TF Gift Exchange fic for Katharos, who asked for slice of life and alien cultures.

Notes/Warnings: In-movie canon character deaths referenced.

The first time he saw it, Lennox had no idea what he was looking at.

To be fair, it was just after Mission City and he was running on a combat adrenaline high and had little idea what any of what he was seeing meant. The impossible, alien, mechanical beings that had walked straight out of some Japanese cartoon and into his nightmares were, he'd been told by his government, 'NBEs', but he had no fucking clue what that meant if he'd ever been told - the suits were fond of their acronyms. More importantly, several of the giants had been pointed out as being on the side of the angels, and in Lennox's post-battle exhaustion they was being dubbed as Big Flamin' Semi, Black Guns, Neon Green, and The Kid's Car.

They'd been handed guns - bigger guns - and sent on a bug hunt for anything mechanical and still twitching in the mess they'd made of downtown Mission City. In the process of putting down what Epps swore was a rabid XBox - "knew there was a reason I got an PS3!" - they'd come across the last of the friendly NBEs, the one Lennox had almost forgotten about in the firefight afterwards, partly buried in rubble.

Half of him, at least, head and arms and torso, but there was nothing but twisted metal and torn fluid spattered cables where his hips and legs should be. No light in his eyes, nothing even still sparking or leaking in the mess. Fuck.

Epps called it in while Lennox and a few of the others staked out a perimeter at a safe distance. "Hey, we found another one, think it's one of our boys - little silver, raybans? Yeah... No. No, I don't think so."

Neon Green showed up post haste, sirens wailing, and it didn't take rocket science to connect the dots that a rescue hummer that unfolded - damn, that was awesome - into a mecha-robot-alien with an eyebleeding emergency green paint job was, like, their squad medic or something. Especially not when he'd been first response to every alien anything they'd called in, and several hours later they all knew the drill now - stand back and let the alien do his alien thing.

Which mostly seemed to involve passing a hand over the chest compartment. Sometimes it popped open easy, other times it creaked and hissed and then Neon Green made some noises like a fax machine getting it on with an untuned electric guitar which Lennox assumed were unsafe for underage ears, and there was prying or metal cutting involved. His best guess was some form of alien checking for a pulse or breath or whatever the first aid equivalent was for giant robots from outer space who didn't breathe or have a heart.

It seemed a little redundant for Silver Raybans - dead was still dead, even for giant alien robots. Lennox had seen The Kid's Car talking and getting along ok without his legs from the knees down but there was a damned sight difference between losing your feet - he knew a few guys who got along just fine without them after prosthetics and PT - and losing everything from the waist down. Silver Raybans wasn't up and joking around. Dead was dead.

Neon Green seemed to agree, but it wasn't the quick, perfunctory check and gruff sounding "it's clear" that the enemy bodies had gotten. Silver Rayban's chest opened up smooth and for a long moment Neon Green rested his hand on the exposed components. Lennox found himself holding his breath - was it possible? Was he...?

No. Neon Green vented a low, downright mournful sound. Lennox almost expected something familiar - a hand passed over the eyes, maybe, to close them, or arranging the sprawled limbs, something a human medic would have done. Silver Raybans didn't really have eyes the way humans did, though, and Neon Green only touched the shoulder of his fallen comrade, friend, whatever, and then reached back into the opened chest and snapped something off, palming it.

That was new... or not. Lennox couldn't remember if Neon Green had done it with the other bodies or not, it had always been quick and business like, wham, bam, done. There was something familiar in watching it right that moment, though. Maybe it was just post-battle adrenaline or maybe it was his brain desperately looking for analogies among the inexplicably alien, anthropomorphizing giant machines, but right then, watching Neon Green snap off a piece of Silver Rayban's inner chest, Lennox thought he knew what he was looking at.

Dogtags. IDing the dead, for whatever bureaucratic process alien militaries did (and no one could tell Lennox that they weren't soldiers in a squad in some sort of military force. That was far too familiar to be just imagining it.) And bureaucracies liked to keep track of people - who was where, who was alive, who was dead, who's mother or widow or kid or whatever in hell the giant robot equivalent was should be drawing a pension, all of that kind of shit. So it made sense, right then, with too many hours awake on adrenaline and caffeine from Qatar to Colorado and coming off a combat rush. Alien military, alien bureaucracy, alien dog tags.

Alien medic, giving them the all clear, and Lennox didn't get a chance to think about it after that. He shouldered his gun and got his team moving, off to tag the next non-terrestrial thing they found.

If he thought that was the strangest his life could get, well, the universe and the United States government just loved to prove him wrong. Six weeks later, Lennox looked back on his naïve self who had thought the weird was over, the battle won, and he was free to go home to his wife and his newborn daughter, and had to blame the exhaustion - it was the dog-tired after combat crash talking, because he knew better, dammit, and once they brought out the red tape it was never over. He'd been signing non-disclosure orders in all but his own blood before he'd even wiped the grit of Mission City off the back of his neck and one quick round of leave or no, there was no way in hell it was 'over'.

Six weeks later, he had gone home. He'd kissed Sarah and held Annabelle for the first time, and that, well, that made up for a lot, even if two weeks of leave seemed barely long enough to shake the sand off his boots. Even if his ride home was a big black Topkick truck that drove itself and ran on fuck knew what, but it sure as hell wasn't gas.

Six weeks after Mission City, William Lennox had swapped his captain's bars for a major's gold leaf and was ostensibly newly stationed at Nellis Air Force base with a team of Rangers running joint ops with the flyboys. That was the cover story. Six weeks after Mission City the reality was that Lennox's life had stepped straight into the Twilight Zone and the team he was heading was multi-national and so buried in government 'top secret' stamps that they might as well all be whistling the X-files theme, and honest to god aliens had become his day to day life.

NEST, they called it. Some new alphabet soup acronym, and the only reason he knew it stood for "Non-biological Extraterrestrial Species Treaty" - and jeezus, what a mouthful - was because it had been drilled into his head as what to absolutely NEVER call it. "NATO Early Solution Taskforce" was the half baked cover that it was on paper for the general public, while "Non-Existant Strike Team" was what most of the boys joked it stood for. The Ghost Squadron. The Mission Impossible team whose existence was going to be denied by everyone in charge.

The brand new patch on his shoulder, opposite the American flag, had a silly government acronym some think tanker had come up with and a millennia old symbol that hadn't even originated on this planet.

He knew their names, now. Black Guns, the Topkick truck, was Ironhide, the team's artillery specialist who had been assigned as Lennox's liaison or body guard - he wasn't quite sure which. Neon Green was Ratchet and they'd been dead on target about him being the team's medic. The kid's - who's name was Sam - yellow Camero was Bumblebee, presumably for some reason more than just his preferred yellow and black paint job. After twenty minutes of an explanation Lennox couldn't make heads or tails of, however, they had concluded that it just didn't translate so well and the alien - who was a scout and who in hell let a scout paint himself bright fucking yellow? - had shrugged and admitted that he just liked the name.

Little Silver Rayban was - had been - First Lieutenant Jazz, or whatever the alien translation of 'first lieutenant' was, second in command of the team. A record fast three days after Mission City Lennox had stood on the flight deck of the USS Enterprise (someone, somewhere, just had not been able to fucking resist) in his best dress blues, along with the rest of his team and a ton of top brass, right up to the Chiefs of Staff and the President, as the bodies of honest-to-god extraterrestrial aliens were slipped overboard into the waters of the Laurentian Abyss. It had been a solemn and mostly silent affair, stiff with standing at attention, but Lennox was proud that he had snapped off a salute as Silver Raybans had been lowered overboard. The rest of his men had followed his lead and Lennox knew he had done right when a sidelong glance had shown the rest of the aliens standing with them had raised their hands to their chests - a salute or a prayer or god only knew what, but it was a gesture none of them had made for the bodies of their enemies.

The last one, Big Flamin' Semi, was undisputedly the leader of the team. His name was Optimus Prime, and it had taken Lennox almost a week to figure out that rather than being any configuration humans used it was 'Optimus' that was the big alien's proper name and 'Prime' was some sort of title or rank, though his team seemed to use both or either at will. It was Ironhide that Lennox finally cornered to play Trivia Pursuit with, the Extraterrestrial Cultural Exchange Edition, and after a lot of back and forth and feeling like he was fumbling his way through political science 101 again Lennox had pieced together that 'Prime' wasn't a military rank but was something more like President, Prime Minister, Pope, and Emperor all rolled into one.

"He is the last of the Primes," Ironhide had told him firmly, and that was when Lennox, with a sinking feeling in his gut, had realized that their alien counterparts weren't just a military squad or even an elite task force - they were the alien equivalent of the Secret Service and Air Force Fucking One, and the eighteen-wheeler with the flash red and blue flame paint job wasn't just a general or a diplomat, he was a sovereign head of state of an alien planet.

He was also older than the entire human species. They all were. It was enough to give a guy a complex.

This, then, was the new reality of Lennox's life. A new commission, on a new, top secret force, on a portion of a base that didn't officially exist. "US postal code, same damned heat," Epps had declared when they had first stepped onto Nellis' tarmac.

"Cel phone service instead of satellite," Lennox had shot back, and everyone had agreed that was a hell of a step up right there.

Every morning Lennox woke up before dawn to run his five miles, in a vain attempt to beat the blistering Nevada heat before it started rolling up off the pavement in waves. Grab a shower, grab a bite, and it was 7am in the morning when his life stopped looking like the routine he'd done his entire career and tripped right over into surreal, because at some point in the last few weeks he'd gotten almost used to the fact that the first duty of each morning was a two hour chunk of time blocked off for meeting with Prime. He was getting used to talking up to a being that was 28 feet tall, and if that wasn't surreal enough then there was always the "talking to a semi truck" alternative, depending on if Optimus was on his feet or his wheels at any given point in time.

One of the first things he'd learned - right up there with the big guy's name - was that Optimus didn't do 'sitting' meetings. For starters, anything they could cobble together that was sized for an alien - a Cybertronian - was makeshift at best. Secondly, it just wasn't something the Prime, in particular, did. A 'sitting' meeting meant Lennox sitting, in the blessedly air conditioned cab of the semi truck, while Optimus drove one of several patrol routes around the base. Lennox hadn't decided yet if the awkward of talking to a dash board was more or less awkward than trotting in the wake of the strides of a several stories tall robot.

"Big engine," Ironhide had rumbled in agreement the one time Lennox had remarked on the Prime's propensity for not sitting still. "And a multi-tiered hub processor that could outstrip a habitation alt." Whatever that meant. They had been sitting in the shade of one of the hangars in the late afternoon, Ironhide with his back leaned up against the hangar wall and Lennox perched on a stack of wood pallets that almost put them on eye level. They had, all of them, the most brilliantly electric blue eyes and Lennox would catch himself staring in fascination at the camera aperture-like shifting of lens and shutters around those blue lights.

"That," Ironhide had added after a thoughtful beat, "and your planetary rotations are so short. Prime's been keeping your government's schedule. Your downshift barely gives him time to cycle off his primary protocols."

Lennox had filed that under good things to know - their home planet's day was longer than an Earth day and the leading alien dignitary was shorting himself on their sleep equivalent in some fashion that probably amounted to a weird mashup of insomnia and galactic jet lag. Cat napping. It had joined a whole host of other trivia picked up along the way, and somewhere in the last six weeks he had stopped thinking of them solely as 'aliens' or 'motherfucking big robots' and had started calling them all by name even in his thoughts. Yeah, they were big and metal and alien. They were also, he was starting to realize, people.

That particular morning Prime was on his feet instead of his wheels, pacing a slow, measured circle around several of the hangars. Lennox had already learned that just because any of them looked like they were staring off into space it was never safe to assume that they actually were - they were, all of them, wired up and plugged in at all times, wireless and satellite and DSL fed right into their heads, and he was learning to tell by the flicker of the light in their eyes when they were multi-tasking, which was nearly always. Lennox had made the mistake, once, of asking the Prime what his schedule was like - he had gotten a schedule file pinged immediately to his smart phone, a full blown spreadsheet that looked like the bastard lovechild of three separate dayplanners, with meetings scheduled by phone or video conference every moment of the day from 6am Eastern to 6pm Pacific, most of them overlapped at least two if not four or five meetings deep. (Optimus had apologized for the - infinitesimal seven second - delay in forwarding him the file, as it had required translation from their native language to English and conversion from whatever file format giant alien robots kept their insanely complex dayplanners in to a simple format that his phone could view.)

Nonetheless, despite that he was probably in several other long distance meetings, the Prime - and that never failed to come out in Lennox's head the same way he'd say 'Mr. President' or 'yes sir' - immediately paused his pacing when Lennox jogged up. A thousand metal plates and parts stooped with an innate fluid grace as the supreme ruler of an extraterrestrial planet dropped to one knee on the pavement, the better to crouch down and loom a little less over Lennox's head. "Good morning, Major Lennox."

"Morning, Prime." There was an art to standing near enough that you didn't feel like you needed to shout, but far enough away that you weren't craning your head all the way back to look at them. Lennox was starting to get the hang of it. "They forwarded me a new crop of dossiers for us to look over. You feel like driving today?"

"I'm afraid that won't be possible, Major," the Prime replied. They were all, with the exception of Bumblebee and his vocal damage, very good at mimicking human voices. Having heard what their native language sounded like, Lennox suspected that whatever they used to speak with wasn't actually capable of articulating human phonemes in English or any other language, and that their voices were something closer to artificial synthesizer sounds broadcast in time with a very good lip synch. It didn't really matter how they did it, though - the Prime's deep resonant voice was still the stuff public orators' wet dreams were made out of, forever calm, sincere, and commanding. "I have a meeting scheduled with Ratchet very shortly."

"Oh!" Well, that was new. The Prime hadn't ever had to cancel on him before, though Lennox supposed it was just a matter of time. "No problem. He's got you in for a check-up, huh?" Or a tire rotation, or oil change, or whatever the hell it was giant robot medics did to their alien teammates who turned into vehicles. Some things, it turned out, were just universal, and when your medic said 'get your sorry ass in here' you sucked it up like a man and went. It looked like that was one of the universal things. "Reschedule? Or it can keep till tomorrow."

Prime actually paused, eyes flickering. Either he was seriously up to the tips of his pointy antenna in meetings or… Lennox watched the direction the light in the Prime's optics slanted and grinned to himself. Or he was on the internal phone to the medic, who was two hangars over in the building he'd claimed as a working space, and if Prime was the soul of diplomacy then Ratchet was something else entirely.

Robots didn't technically breathe which meant they probably couldn't technically sigh, but the sound Prime made was very close to one. "Actually, Major, Ratchet requests your presence as well if you're not too busy."

Whoah. Lennox took a half step back before he'd even consciously thought about it. "Me? Why?"

"Because you were at Mission City." The Prime stood with the same ease that he had lowered himself, leaving Lennox staring at flame detailed wheel wells that curved into massive, thick calves. His feet and lower legs were disproportionately large compared to his upper body - better for balance and stability, Lennox guessed, which could be important when your center of balance was some 19 feet up in the air.

And ok, wow… being requested to come in by an alien doc because he'd been at ground zero in a sci-fi battle - really didn't sound so good. Lennox cut off a few reflexive knee jerk thoughts about radiation and the like; they'd been ticking with it, all of them, afterwards, but their own docs had said they'd be fine, nothing to worry about, perfectly harmless…

Deep breath, Lennox. Chill. "Coming, Major?" Prime, if he noticed Lennox's kicked up heart rate, politely didn't mention it. Lennox took another few deep breaths and jogged after him.

Ratchet had set up shop in an empty hangar with nothing but a sturdy table welded together out of scrap metal and the tools on his immediate person. If there had been one disappointment in the whole 'giant alien robots' schtick it had been the lack of 'giant alien spaceship', tricked out in crazy advanced alien equipment. On the one hand, it was cool as shit that their new buddies could apparently fold themselves up all compact-like, swan dive through orbital re-entry, hit the ground, and get right back up, dust themselves off and walk away from the landing. That was crazy mad cool. On the other hand, well, Lennox kind of missed the whole 'alien spaceship' angle, and it made a lot of things he didn't want to linger on tense up at the idea of basically airlift dropping into unknown territory with nothing but the pack on your back.

"Gotta be a ship," Epps had said, late one night over beers. "Gotta be. I mean, they didn't walk here, right? So there's gotta be a ship." He'd waved a hand at the dim stars overhead, eclipsed by the brilliant lights of nearby Las Vegas. "Somewhere out there, where we can't see. With a crew and shit. And they're, like, the landing team."

"Yeah," Lennox had snorted, "'cus Prime's a real Captain Kirk type, right?"

"Could be a small ship," Epps had allowed. "Maybe it's just them and a couple others, left one or two minding the ship while they came down."

"Maybe," Lennox had agreed. What neither of them had wanted to say aloud was that maybe there were no others. Epps was right - there had to have been a ship - but maybe there wasn't anyone else on it. Maybe there wasn't even a ship any more. Lennox wasn't privy to all of the details of what the Prime had negotiated with the governments of Earth, but there wasn't any mention in what he had seen of additional personnel to be expected forthwith, or anything about a ship anywhere.

Ratchet's proper title wasn't 'doctor', it was Chief Medical Officer of the Autobot forces. And he was working with nothing but a scrap metal table and whatever robot first aid kit he'd had in the equivalent of his pockets. Lennox didn't want to be the one to say it, but that sounded a hell of a lot more like "refugee" than "benevolent advanced alien visitors".

The medic with his distinctive eyebleeding shade of chartreuse paint was waiting for them in the hanger. There was a set of scaffolding steps that lead up to the top of the worktable; Lennox took them at a quick trot, skipping the last few to the top. "Hey, doc, what's- whoah!" The last was because Ratchet's hand had abruptly come down in front of him, curving around to his left side in a smooth sweep.

"Careful, Major," the medic said gruffly. "I need these to remain sterile, if you please."

'These' were some wicked looking sharp and drill bit tipped instruments that were sized for hands large enough to pick a grown man up wholesale, and which were laid out with surgical precision across the left side of the table. Lennox raised his hands, backing quickly away. "Sorry, doc! You want me down?"

"Not necessary, just stay on that side," Ratchet told him. When Lennox had stepped back to what he considered a suitable distance, he promptly turned his attention to his commander. Something - and Lennox could never tell if it was alien body language or private comms - passed between them and then the Prime made that curious almost-sigh again and stepped up to the edge of the table.

Ratchet nodded sharply and then, when it was on the tip of Lennox's tongue to ask why Ratchet had wanted him to come along and what was up, the world abruptly decided that he'd gotten a little too complacent with the whole level of strangeness and upped the ante again.

A slim piece of metal the length of Lennox's upper arm was clicked down onto the table in front of Prime, the medic's motions quick and smooth. "Bonecrusher," Ratchet stated firmly. Another, identical piece was clicked down beside the first. "Barricade." A third was produced, and this one was placed in front of Lennox, who only barely managed not to jump. "Blackout."

The Prime could make his expressions very 'lifelike', for lack of a better word. Very mobile, for a face made entirely of interlocking metal plates. Right then, however, his expression was still and unreadable, as was Ratchet's. Lennox looked from one to the other, then back to the pieces of metal on the table. They were, to his eye, identical - thin pieces of something like brightly polished silver, heavily engraved in an almost circuit board like pattern. "Blackout?"

Ratchet tapped one fingertip against the metal piece that had been laid at Lennox's feet. "The rotary alt - helicopter?" His eyes flickered for a bare moment - probably double checking something on the internet - and then he nodded. "Yes, helicopter. The one you took down in Mission City."

Which, yes, Lennox remembered quite vividly. It had been one of the crazier things he had done, sliding between that thing's legs with a sabot round and more desperation than common sense or good idea. Epps had quite cheerfully told him it was one of the stupider stunts he had ever pulled and Lennox had been forced to agree.

"Jazz?" Optimus asked solemnly. Ratchet tilted his head towards the back of the hangar, where several pieces of equipment including a large forge had been among the first things he had requisitioned from NEST.

"Already smelted." The medic flicked a finger at the tools. "Everything's ready if you've decided."

Prime had raised a hand to his own face, touching cheek and earpiece and jaw, before dropping to his collar faring. "Here," he said quietly. Ratchet nodded, gesturing briskly, and Lennox had found himself in a position to watch as the Prime was seated on an equally makeshift scrap metal stool that barely looked as though it would hold his full weight. The larger mech had turned his face away, eyes shuttered, as Ratchet had taken up something that looked, in his hands, like a fine dremel drill. The whine and spark of metal on metal was unmistakable, something like a cross between a dentist's drill and a machine shop, the sound putting Lennox's teeth on edge and making his very bones crawl.

One pass, then another and another. The space Ratchet was working on was mercifully small, not only for the sake of Lennox's ears but because he was almost certain it was physically hurting the Prime. There was a tension in the big frame, something that shivered every time the medic's drill made contact.

Ratchet quickly switched to another tool, something that whined less but whirred more. The same number of touches and passes, and then it was over. When he stepped back Lennox could see, quite plainly, where a deep, neat mark had been literally carved into Optimus' plating. Leaving his patient with a tap on the shoulder that probably meant 'don't move', Ratchet went to withdraw something from the forge.

It made sense - they had, after all, survived orbital re-entry heat without a hitch - but it was still alarming to see Ratchet reach directly into the forge to remove a container of red hot liquid metal with his bare hand. It was tiny, barely the size of a shotglass in the medic's grasp. He brought it back to the Prime, picked up another tool, and though the medic was now bent over his work, blocking Lennox's view, it was definitely not his imagination that Optimus winced, hissing, at whatever it was that Ratchet was doing.

When Ratchet stepped back the mark on the Prime's plating was still there - but filled, now, in a red hot line of molten metal that was flush with the original plate surface. It would, Lennox realized, look very similar to the enameled alien marks that already decorated the Prime's plating on his cheek and ear.

Jazz, he had said, and that was when it had all come together in Lennox's mind. Pieces of metal, snapped from within the chests of the dead in the aftermath of Mission City. Understated silver - it was always silver - marks, obviously deliberate, decorating the 'skin' of their new allies. They had all seen them and wondered at them. Tattoos? Scarring? Tribal marks? There were some questions that got pushed way down on the queue of importance and which were awkward as hell to try to ask anyways.

And here was the answer, right in front of him. Identification tags, collected not for bureaucracy but for something that Lennox could only assume was a funeral rite, something cultural and alien and utterly understandable at the same time. "That's Jazz's name, isn't it?" he asked quietly.

Prime's hand raised automatically for the point on his collar; Ratchet, like any doctor in the history of anywhere, slapped it back down again. "Let it cool," he snarled. Then, more reasonably, "That's correct, Major. I believe your people have something similar?"

Lennox looked up, taking in the designs on the rest of the Prime's face, and wondered what the names were that he couldn't read. "Tattoos," he replied absently. "People will… sometimes get a name tattooed on when someone - family, friend - dies. In remembrance. That's what that is, isn't it?"

"In a fashion," Optimus replied, at the same moment Ratchet said "Yes." Making a sound like a snort, Ratchet reached to tap a finger against one of the metal pieces on the table.

"These," he said briskly, "are unique. They are pieces of ourselves, a fragment of our spark casing. Our sparks are our souls, if you will - the things which inhabits and grants life to what would otherwise be inert metal. At the point of deactivation a portion of the casing is broken free. Every casing is unique, no two alike."

He twisted, pushing his other arm into Lennox's field of view. There, at the forward crest of the medic's shoulder, was another small inlaid mark which Lennox realized, after a moment of comparison, was an exact duplicate of the freshly cooling mark on Oprimus' collar. "Melted," Ratchet continued calmly, "the metal is inert and compatible with all other material composites in our frames. Traditionally a fallen mech's close friends will wear his name glyph smelted into their own frame to remember him by."

Tattoos, Lennox thought. Done in ink created from the ashes of the deceased. It sounded terribly morbid like that when the reality - and he could trace over a half a dozen markings on Optimus easily, now that he knew what he was looking for, and a dozen or more on Ratchet - was both beautiful and a heart wrenching truth. Those were the names of their dead. And on the table… "Wait, so… what's up with these guys? They weren't your friends."

The look Ratchet shot him was one that Lennox couldn't decipher. Turning away without answering, the medic picked up one of the two metal pieces that he had set in front of Prime. "Bonecrusher," he announced. "Decide where, Optimus."

The Prime looked distinctly uncomfortable, the lights of his eyes darting from Lennox to his medic and back again. "Ratchet, I don't believe…"

"Now, Prime," Ratchet snapped. "I'd like to not be all day at this." The small piece of metal that apparently meant Bonecrusher and no other went into the forge to be melted down.

Prime was determinedly not meeting Lennox's eyes. Something released - it was a sigh without being one - in the vicinity of the semi cab that made up the majority of Optimus' chest. Plates unlocked, spinning away, until one entire side flipped and rotated out, revealing…

Lennox felt his eyes go wide. Beneath the flash flame streaked plating there were hundreds of name cartouches. Several dozen in that one area alone, carved and enameled in miniature across the inside of the Prime's plating, some of them inscribed into the surface of inner parts that Lennox wasn't enough of an engineer to name. They were clustered - a grouping there, a spiral there, names stacked atop one another.

The names written into their exterior 'skin' had a solemn gravity to them, remembrance tattoos for fallen friends. The inside of Prime's plating, however, looked like… like… the nearest analogy Lennox could make was the hash mark ticks of kills painted onto the noses of hot shot fighter planes. Tally marks. Counting coupe, and that was suddenly a different view entirely, something gruesome and more than a little disturbing.

He must have said part of that aloud, at least the human analogy name for it, because both Cybertronians had a moment of eye flicker while they checked the internet. Then- "No, Major," very firmly and cooly from Optimus, and that was a voice that could make you feel all of ten inches tall without even trying. "These are not 'kill tallies'." The way he said it made Lennox flush, ashamed. "They are remembrances, and our way of honoring our dead. We are all of us, Autobot and Decepticon alike, Cybertronians. When we die our sparks return to the Well, and within the Well all are as one. We are all the same and every death, be it friend or foe, deserves to be remembered."

Religion, a small part of Lennox's brain was busy noting, along with red flags of Danger! Danger Will Robinson!, because God (any of them) knew humans couldn't talk to other humans about religion without screwing shit up, much less to extraterrestrials from another planet. The rest of him was busy being ten inches high and seven years old, tracking mud through his mama's freshly mopped kitchen. "Sorry," he managed, then, more strongly, "Sorry. I just… I'm not sure I understand. Why put one on the inside and one on the outside, then?"

Prime made a man feel ashamed. Ratchet just made him feel dumb, the look he favored Lennox with suggesting that there were more intelligence to be found in lizards than in most of human kind. "How would you feel," he asked pointedly, "if your mortal enemy displayed the names of your friends that he had killed out where you could see them?"

Lennox felt the anvil hit, his jaw dropping open for a moment before he could stop it. That made a brutal kind of sense, elegant in its sheer simplicity. Don't taunt your enemies by rubbing it in their faces. "Oh… shit."

Ratchet snorted. "Precisely," he drawled, turning his attention back to Prime. "Placement?"

There were plates shifting in little twitches all along the Prime's body, but he pointed out a relatively blank area atop what looked like a reserve gas tank along his side. "Here," he said heavily. "Mission City. Put it here."

Ratchet, his eyes narrowed to gleaming streaks, reached for his tools again. "Hold still."

If the exterior plate engraving had hurt, it was apparently nothing compared to an interior system. The Prime didn't say a word, but Lennox watched the large hand laid on the edge of table clench almost spasmodically, tighter and tighter as Ratchet's drill whined away. He had, he realized, been holding his own breath by the time Ratchet stopped, and the explosive vent of the Prime's systems was loud in the hangar.

Melted metal was applied, red hot and steaming, and then Ratchet picked up the next piece and the entire sequence had to be done again, Prime's fingertips gouging dents into the metal of the table edge for all that he never made a sound. By the time it was done Lennox felt as though he had run a marathon in the heat. There was something exhausting in the deliberately applied pain, something terrible and beautiful all at once that was exemplified there, in two fresh silver markings when Optimus finally closed his armor plates back up again, hiding them safely from view.

It was alien and not alien at the same time, a conviction that would drive a man to remember his enemies even more vividly than his friends, burned into his own flesh and bone permanently for all time. Older than humanity, Lennox reminded himself. Older than the entire planet, an incredibly long lived species with computers for brains that never forgot. Every name remembered, carried on, whether friend or foe. It made him feel small and insignificant and very transitory.

Crouching down, he pressed his hand gingerly to the metal plate that Ratchet had placed in front of him. It was cool and almost slick to the touch, the engraving feeling like bas relief beneath his fingers. "I can't do that," he said at last.

"No," Ratchet agreed promptly. He was wiping his tools down, laying them back out in that neat line. "You can't wear it externally and there's no way, on an organic, to place the marking internally."

"Why give it to me, then?" Lennox asked.

"Because it is yours by right," Optimus replied. He was hunched a little on the stool, one hand pressed over the top of the plate that shielded the new engravings, but his voice was steady. "You brought down Blackout. Traditionally, his remembrance falls to you."

Lennox shook his head. "I'm betting you 'traditionally' don't have to deal with crazy monkeys doing dumb ass stunts in the middle of your battlefields."

Ratchet's mouth turned up at the corners, one more so than the other. "You said it, Major, not I."

"Ha ha," Lennox agreed wryly. "I'm serious. I… can't. This isn't something a human can do. I'm not even talking about the whole molten metal enamel thing. It's just… my entire lifespan is a drop in the bucket to you guys. Doesn't seem fair to this Blackout guy to be remembered for a fraction of the time everyone else gets."

It was like saluting when Jazz had gone under the waves. There was just nothing else to be done, and Lennox could feel, in his gut, that it was the right thing to do. Medic and Prime shared another glance and then Optimus was nodding slowly. "There is precedent," he allowed, "for asking another to remember for you if you cannot." He hesitated slightly, then inclined his head. "You may ask any of us, as you like, but I am certain Ironhide would be honored to carry your remembrance for you."

Lennox nodded slowly. His hand, when he drew it back from the metal plate, felt like it was half asleep, something prickling and electric pulsing through his skin. He scrubbed it off against his pantleg as he pushed himself back to his feet. "Good. Great. I'll do that, then."

Once Ratchet was finished cleaning up and Optimus had assured the medic he was fine they were all but bum-rushed out from the hangar. "Please don't take Ratchet's bluster seriously," Optimus said once they were out of hearing range. "He has never, to the best of my knowledge, thrown anything at anyone with serious intent to injure."

"Good to know," Lennox agreed, checking his watch. The new level of strange, like all the levels before it, smoothed quickly into something almost normal. "Forty-five minutes left. Time enough to look at a few of those dossiers."

"Of course," the Prime replied gravely. The impossible whirl of moving metal collapsed down into a flaming semi, driver's side door popping open into an oasis of air conditioned seating. Grinning, Lennox climbed in.

He waited until Prime was on his wheels and headed out of the base before he finally spoke up, clearing his throat slightly as he did so. "Sorry, by the way. About the misunderstanding. Didn't mean to insult you."

There was only the rumble of a large non-diesel engine for a moment. "There is no apology needed. Thank you, Major, for understanding."

There was something in the Prime's tone, synthesized or no, which made Lennox smile, the expression easy and natural. They were aliens, true. Giant alien robots from outer space. And this was now his surreal life. Despite that, they were still very much people, and he'd dare any upper brass to try to tell him otherwise. "Hey. Don't mention it. We're a team, right?" He reached out and dared, for the first time, to pat a hand along the dashboard before sitting back and taking out his smart phone. "Ok, so, dossiers. I'm sending you the first file. The Brits are putting forward one of their SAS - Air service, special forces. Name of Graham…"