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Ratchet wasn't giving any news.
He had wheeled his patient into the operating room hours ago, and there was still nothing coming out of it. No news, no call, no one coming out, no one being called in. Just silence and waiting.
Ironhide hated waiting.
He hated not having anything to do besides staying in front of a closed door, standing by with only his processor for company. Waiting for someone who might or might not still be alive.
Footsteps reached his audio receptors, and Ironhide's guns were at the ready before the incoming bot had even begun turning the corner. It sounded like Jazz's footsteps, but today, Ironhide wasn't taking any chance.
The bot turned the corner, and it looked like it was Jazz. Ironhide relaxed slightly. He only transformed back the guns when the bot pinged him with verified identification.
"You're more paranoid than usual," Jazz noted.
Ironhide scoffed. "As if you're any better today. Any news?"
Jazz settled next to him, resting his back against the wall, before he answered. "The Cons are fully retreating. At least we haven't lost this battle."
"We didn't exactly win it either," Ironhide remarked.
Jazz sighed, and he turned minutely towards the door, where Ratchet had disappeared with a barely-online Optimus Prime long before the battle ended. Any other battle, Ironhide would have been there still, fighting alongside fellow Autobots then counting wins and casualties. But not today.
"Anything new here?" Jazz asked softly.
Ironhide sighed too, before settling right next to Jazz. "No. Nothing. Ratchet took Prime in there and nothing has come out since."
Jazz hummed, then decided to just fix the door to the operating room too.
"There's something-" he said after a little while, then stopped himself.
Stopping in the middle of a sentence wasn't like Jazz. But maybe today was the first time for a lot of things.
"Something…?" Ironhide prompted, because any distraction was welcome at this point.
Jazz slowly ex-vented, then looked up to the ceiling and the little window that was only showing a grey sky.
"…There's something weird outside," he said carefully. "I don't know how to describe it. It's almost as if everything had stopped."
Ironhide frowned. "You just told me the Cons were retreating."
"No, I mean- It's a feeling, alright? Like something broke when Optimus-"
Jazz didn't finish the sentence, but Ironhide knew exactly how it was going to end. He knew that better than Jazz, who had been on the field himself when all of a sudden their entire world had been upended.
It had been hours ago, but it was still haunting Ironhide's processor. Optimus's hand suddenly clutching his chest plates, Optimus doubling over, Optimus falling to the floor in a heap of limbs. Optimus's optics blowing up when Ironhide was barely beginning to move, Optimus screaming in pain before he had even reached him.
The other bots in the command post had tried to reach out too, but the scene had been so unexpected, so shocking, that Ironhide might as well have been alone in there. He had barely registered the gunfire stopping and the mechs all around turning towards the fallen Prime. He'd tried to call out to Optimus, to call for help. Now, he was pretty sure that no one had even heard him.
Optimus's agonizing screams were still echoing in his audio receptors. It was filling the corridor the same way that spilled energon was filling a battlefield. And Ironhide could do nothing about it.
A sudden hand on his arm nearly made him shoot the bot next to him.
"Hey, relax a bit," Jazz said. "Ratchet has got him. He'll be fine."
But Ironhide could feel how tightly Jazz's hand was squeezing his arm. Even Jazz didn't fully believe his own attempt at reassurance.
Then again, a glance at Jazz's hand on his arm showed him that his own fingers had been gripping that arm strongly enough to bend the metal. Maybe he should, in fact, relax a bit.
When Jazz released his arm, Ironhide forced his fingers to let go of the armor. The pain still didn't register. All he could think about was Optimus's shattered voice, Optimus's unseeing optics, Optimus's greying frame.
"There's nothing you could have done," Jazz said.
Ironhide scoffed. Of course Jazz had understood what he wasn't fully allowing himself to think about, but what did he know? He hadn't been there, a small and cruel part of his processor wanted to say, immediately crushed by the twin thoughts that Jazz was a friend and a good bot, and that Jazz's role in the battle had been more than necessary.
"I'm his bodyguard," Ironhide stated. "I should have protected him."
Jazz's visor looked at the closed door, behind which Ratchet was fighting Primus for Optimus's spark, and stayed fixed on it. A weaker bot would have collapsed under the burden of knowing of the Prime's state, but Jazz was barely leaning against the wall. "I don't know how you could have protected him from this," he whispered.
Ironhide's processor had been telling him the same thing for hours, so he just told Jazz the same thing that he had been telling himself since he began waiting here.
"It doesn't matter. I should have."