Chapter Text
Prowl woke to Red’s face, too close and blurry.
He flinched, optics struggling to focus. Red’s expression went from curious concern to placid. He leaned back.
Prowl’s face was wet. The scent of his own spilled fuel half drowned him, and he could taste it in the back of his throat. He reached up stupidly to touch, and when he pulled his hand away from his nose to look at it his fingertips were smeared in pink.
He'd passed out. Again. Disconcerting, but not entirely unexpected. His head hurt, distantly, but that was nothing compared to the ache at being alone. Prowl missed his gestalt more than he’d missed his shattered optic. Minor physical damage like that was nothing, but their absence ate at him incessantly. It couldn’t be ignored.
Prowl had hoped distance and time would make this easier. He’d hoped his own mind and spark would recalibrate -- that they would remember that combined was not his default state, that he was Prowl, not just one piece of Devastator.
It hadn’t worked. Not yet. That made no difference. Prowl would keep trying. It remained the best of all available options.
“I found you on the floor,” Red said. “Passed out. Your nose is bleeding.”
Prowl grunted. His statistical processor finished booting up and filled his HUD with a flood of suggested courses of action that Prowl tried his best to ignore. He attempted to sit up and couldn’t.
“You can’t stand,” Red said.
“I’m fine.” Prowl wiped the bleeding energon from his face with the back of his hand. His nose kept leaking. He sniffled. “This happens sometimes. It never lasts.”
Red didn’t seem impressed. “You don’t look fine. I’m taking you to the medibay.”
Prowl wanted to argue. Red bent down and tucked one arm behind Prowl’s neck, and the other under his knees. The contact felt good. It wasn’t his gestalt, but it was something, a warm frame and a concerned touch.
Red strained, just barely lifting Prowl from the floor, then slowly lowered him and exhaled a hot breath from his vents.
“You’re heavier than you look.”
“I’m aware.” It was a result of what the Decepticons had done to him when they’d rebuilt his body to suit their own ends -- the required alterations had been extensive, and the extra components they’d installed to make Prowl function as a combiner weren’t light.
Prowl was ashamed of it, for reasons he didn't really understand. It was an irrational, useless feeling, but one he couldn't shake.
Red let Prowl go and stood. The places where he’d been felt very cold. Prowl hoped that Red would leave him here. He knew how to deal with this himself. He didn't need help, just time.
Instead, Red radioed Max. “Prowl collapsed,” Red said, quiet and even. “Yes, I’m with him. Help me take him to the medibay. He’s too heavy for me to lift.”
Prowl lay still and said nothing. He was angry -- he wanted to be left alone, he could handle this, he didn’t need assistance, he didn’t want anyone seeing him this way -- but he felt something else, too, heavy in his chest and unfamiliar.
Red crouched down beside him, a cleaning cloth in one hand, and wiped Prowl’s face clean.
By the time Max got there, Prowl had managed to sit up. Red was holding the cloth to his nose, trying to help the leak clot.
Max actually looked concerned. It wasn’t an expression Prowl was accustomed to seeing aimed in his own direction, and it took him a moment to parse.
“I’m fine,” Prowl said.
“You don’t look fine.” Max bent low. “Come on.”
Red removed the cloth from Prowl’s face; the bleeding fuel had slowed to a trickle. The pressure had hurt, but Prowl missed the contact anyway. Red stepped back. Max slipped his arms under Prowl’s frame and lifted him easily. Prowl didn’t try to resist.
“You are heavy,” Max said. “What is all this?”
Prowl was extremely sick of people commenting on his weight. His inexplicable shame felt like anger. “Combiner alterations,” he snapped.
Max didn’t know what to say to that, it seemed. He stood, cradling Prowl against his chest. Max’s engine rumbled big and deep; it reminded Prowl painfully of Bonecrusher. His gestalt had awakened a neediness in him that he hadn’t thought possible. It wasn’t the same -- Prowl didn’t want it to be the same -- but Max’s closeness somehow eased the pain, and soothed the edges of that gaping wound.
“I’ll take him to the medibay,” Max said to Red. “Call Cerebros. He--”
“No.”
Prowl hadn’t meant for the protest to come out so desperate and strangled. He felt abruptly ashamed, but what use was pride to him now?
Max and Red shared a glance. Red turned away. Max looked down at Prowl. “He’s not exactly a medical doctor, but he’s the closest we have,” Max said.
Prowl rubbed at the back of his own neck with one shaky, bloodied hand. An embarrassingly transparent gesture, but he couldn’t hold it back. “No,” he said again. “I’m fine.”
Max and Red exchanged another concerned, uncomfortable glance. They understood the source of Prowl’s reluctance, and not just intellectually. Red’s mind had been altered too. And as for Max -- Prowl had read Max’s medical records after the Wreckers had recovered him from G-9. And he’d read Chromedome’s report about Overlord’s escape on the Lost Light. Max’s gouged-out eyes, Overlord’s mnemosurgical finger-drills -- it wasn’t difficult to put two and two together.
“I understand why you don’t want him to see you,” Red said. “But you’re clearly not fine. We need to do something.”
Seeing Cerebros over this would be pointless. But they wouldn't believe him unless he explained. He didn't want to, but…
“Cerebros can't fix what's wrong with me,” Prowl said. “No one can.”
Their optics widened with what could only be concern, which made no sense at all; even if they thought he was dying, why would they care? Prowl barked out a strangled little laugh at the absurdity.
Max and Red both looked hurt. Prowl frowned, recalculating. An image of Max’s face came abruptly to mind -- the moment when Max had decided to stop beating him. Prowl frowned, sniffled, and rubbed his nose.
“It’s a side-effect of what was done to me to make me a combiner,” Prowl said. “A proper combiner, not a temporary one held together by the Enigma. They… Hook and Bombshell, they... altered my frame. Extensively. It wasn’t without ramifications.”
Prowl sniffed again. Red reached up and wiped his nose. Prowl wanted to push him away. He didn’t.
“Hook made further alterations later,” Prowl said, “in an attempt to mitigate the symptoms. It didn’t work. I still get the nosebleeds and the headaches. I still pass out.” He still had other symptoms too, but there was a limit to how much he was willing to disclose. “If Hook can’t figure out a solution, Cerebros doesn’t have a chance. And besides...”
Besides, Cerebros had already been inside Prowl’s head once without Prowl’s permission. Prowl couldn’t exactly blame him -- it had been to save Prowl’s life, and it had worked -- but it was still one more violation in a list that was getting too long too quickly. Prowl hated to admit it, but he was running out of resources to cope.
The silence dragged on. Max and Red exchanged another long glance. Red nodded. Max sighed.
“All right,” Max said. “We’ll take you to your berth. But if you get worse instead of better, we’re getting you some help, even if it means we have to send you back to Cybertron.”
Prowl didn’t protest. Max shifted Prowl’s weight in his arms. He walked, engine purring, frame pleasantly warm. Prowl heard Red shift modes and drive behind them. It wasn’t the intimacy of his gestalt, but Max’s closeness and their concern awoke the same strange needy weakness in Prowl’s spark.
Prowl let himself go lax and allowed his cheek rest against Max’s warm and rumbling chest, pride be slagged.
They put him in his room and deposited him carefully on his berth, but they kept checking on him.
Max came back first, a folded thermal blanket in his arms. Prowl was sitting in his berth, back to the wall, datapad in one hand and pressing the now-filthy cloth to his nose with the other. He looked up. Max frowned down at him, shifting the blanket in his arms, started to hand it to him, then abruptly changed his mind and draped the blanket over Prowl’s shoulders.
Max left immediately, without saying a word. Prowl watched him go, adjusted the blanket a bit, and kept reading.
He didn’t need a blanket. Nothing about his condition had the effect of making him cold. But the warmth was pleasant, if unnecessary. Prowl left it where it was.
Red came in a little later, carrying a cube of energon and a straw.
Prowl wasn't low on fuel, but when Red held the cube out, Prowl took it anyway; he’d spent too much of the past few months hungry to feel comfortable turning down a meal.
Red stood there inspecting him for a moment. His thoughtful frown deepened. He pulled a clean cloth out of a subspace container and handed that to Prowl too.
Prowl took it and pressed it to his nose. Red nodded and drove off.
Prowl took a cautious sip through the straw. The fuel was medical grade. Unnecessary, and the medical nanites and extra mineral and metal additives would have no effect on his condition whatsoever. An inefficient use of wartime resources.
But the war was, to some degree, over; at the very least, it had become more complicated.
Prowl didn’t need the medical-grade fuel, any more than he needed the blanket. He drank it anyway, nestled in his blanket, and tried to read.
He couldn’t concentrate. His head hurt -- irrelevant -- but something else nagged at him too, infinitely more distracting. He kept remembering the moment Max had decided to stop beating him. The expression on Max’s face.
There was no reason the memory should be so distracting; Prowl had been beaten pretty regularly in recent memory. But something about it nagged him.
He shook his head, nestled deeper in his blanket, sipped his drink, and tried to concentrate on reading.