The Shadow of Kaon

A score to settle

The inpatient ward of the medbay, which was usually a quiet and peaceful room for all the injured and healing bots, now swarmed with a handful of vehicon soldiers, a few worker-class miners, and one or two data clerks, making the place more lively than it had been in a long time with all the chit-chats and quarrellings as they stood around Darkwing's medberth, talking over each other.

The femme, on the other hand, mostly stayed silent.

She sat on the edge of the berth, hands loosely resting in her lap, sometimes nodding to their questions and quietly chuckling at their jokes, but with each passing minute, her wings twitched lightly, showing that deep down, she had darker things in her processor than this lighthearted visit from the crewmembers.

"Really guys, I'm fine!" She insisted, trying to refuse the small cube of high-grade that one of the soldiers brought to her, secretly glancing toward the already piling cubes by her side. "I can't even get any Energon outside of med-grade now, it's Knockout's order!"

"You need to get back your strength, sweetspark." Muttered in a low voice one of the sturdier miners, his frame dull and lightless from the hard work he and the other miners did down in the caves underneath the planet's surface, and his voice harsher than the others', probably from being used to a less refined manner of speaking. "After what happened, you are lucky to be alive."

"Yeah, disagreeing with Commander Starscream was not a good idea." Chimed in a clerk from the background, his digits involuntarily reaching up toward the edge of his visor as if it would want to fall down in any second. "What if he had injured you more seriously? If the medic didn't stop the bleeding in time?"

"More seriously? She was comatose for more than a week!" Another, soldier-class bot looked back toward their dataclerk companion, his battle mask hiding his expressions, but his tone making it clear that even he couldn't believe the events.

"You know what I mean!" The clerk shrugged his shoulders, quickly turning his helm back toward the femme with a disapproving helmshake. "But really, what were you thinking? Blatantly going against orders... It's so unlike you to disobey higher-ups, Darkwing."

"The Commander still went too far with his punishment." Continued the earlier miner mech. "Even Lord Megatron kept himself from just randomly ripping off his body parts when he failed with his 'let's overthrow Megatron' plans over the years."

"Guys, enough!" Finally getting a moment to speak, the small seeker sighed, sounding partially annoyed from their overbearing behavior, but trying to keep her composure. "Look... I've already received a scolding from Knockout for everything that happened, so I don't need one from you too. Soon, I can return to easier physical work on the computers... Until then, please try not to do stupid things, okay?" She looked at the most troublemaking soldier for a longer moment, waiting for them to nod, then the smile returned to her face. "Thank you. It's only up to you to keep our ranks together. It doesn't matter who leads the Decepticons temporarily; our goal still hasn't changed. It's up to us to keep the cause on steady peds until Lord Megatron can return to us."

To this, the others exchanged a disturbed, nervous look.

"Do you... still believe that he will get better? It's already been weeks..." One of them asked finally, and the femme nodded without the smallest moment of hesitation.

"I don't have any doubt." She answered calmly, and before any of them could continue, the ward's door opened, letting in the quickly walking cherry red medic with his face deep in a datapad, seemingly reading something on it with great interest.

His pedsteps clicked against the metal floor for a few more seconds before he glanced up, stopping dead in his tracks, watching the unusually large group with an ever-growing frustrated expression on his face.