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The energy bolts tore through Prowl's plating with disturbing ease and burning accuracy.
Immediately, the pain, overwhelming, made him black out.
He onlined again - his internal chronometer said he had only missed a couple of astro-seconds - to the sound of gunfire. Nothing new. That was clearly the same fight that had just taken him out.
Then the pain came back with a vengeance. Prowl's frame tried to gasp. He only managed to spit some energon.
Gunfire was still a constant sound. He needed to get out of the way. Avoid further injury. Let other bots deal with the assailants.
Pain was the other constant. It was everywhere. In the spots that had been pierced by the drones' weapons. At the back of his helm - had he collided with something, a wall, a doorway, a support beam? In his spinal strut and the joints of his door wings - he had to have crashed into the floor. In his legs - ah, no, those were just more holes. In his torso and midsection, where his energon was sluggishly leaking from.
A few shots came very close to his helm. He should move. Get out of the way. If he could just... move this heavy frame...
Someone was yelling. Or two people, maybe?
He just needed to move. The rest could come later. When he'd have rested. Maybe then his processor would parse the sounds. If he ever onlined again. He forcibly stopped the thought.
Move. His legs couldn't do anything, they only answered with pain when he tried to move them. The rest of his frame could do something, maybe? His upper frame was hurting. It hadn't been shot, though. Not as much.
Prowl's side slammed into the floor, hard, sticky, energon-blue. Progress. Pain, too, deep. Something rattled in his chest. Something leaked more energon.
Another effort. His other arm hit the floor too.
He tried not to think of the energon trail he must be leaving behind himself. Focusing on the movements of his arms was hard enough already. The edges of his vision kept glitching. Sounds were a dissonant jumble of possibly-gunfire and maybe-voices and perhaps-his-own-frame-falling-apart. Impossible to find any meaning in it. The pain was clouding everything. He hoped his frame was following the order he had given it. Move. Move out of the way.
A pop-up window appeared in the middle of his field of vision. It took him - his chronometer must have shut down - too long to understand what it meant. Big. Red. Words he knew but couldn't remember.
Loss of pressure in fuel lines: critical
Oh.
He supposed, faintly, that he should be worried about it. Then that thought left too, lost in the haze of all-encompassing pain.
Move. Move an arm, then the other. Pull on his entire frame, ignore the pain, to make it move. Drop on the floor. Get back- Try to get back up. Push on an arm. Slip. Hurt. Push on an arm. Get up. Fall back down. Hurt. Get back u-
Something grabbed him.
Someone grabbed him.
Someone grabbed him and turned him around and-
His vision glitched.
His processor lost count of time.
Something pressed against his frame, inside his frame. The pain made his processor boot up again.
Beep beep clk
The something-someone was yellow and communicating with beeping and pressing painfully against some of the most painful areas of him.
Beep beep?
Bumblebee. It was Bumblebee, it must be.
Something burned, inside of him. The pain made his vision clear up.
His processor processed his audio receptors' input again just in time to hear his own muffled screams. That explained the pain in his throat. Had his frame understood the quick command of no sound, don't attract the drones, after all?
A painfully red pop-up disappeared from his field of vision - but the pain itself barely subsided - when Bumblebee removed his hand from Prowl's leg.
The limb was covered in energon. Had Bumblebee been hurt too?
Then Bumblebee looked straight at him, beeped apologetically, then stabbed him again.
No, Prowl thought between two held back howls of pain, not stabbing. Bumblebee was putting his fingers into the holes of Prowl's frame. Bumblebee was brushing against the sensitive internal sensors that usually didn't send any information to his processor, but were now burning in agony.
Prowl tried his best to focus on what Bumblebee was doing. The fingers were wiggling, setting off extremely painful sensors that made him glitch every time. Then they touched an energon line, one cut by the energy shots he had been hit with. Bumblebee's fingers pinched and burned then.
Energon gushed out of the wound, then the flow slowly tapered off. The hole was throbbing with pain, the inside of it was burning from whatever Bumblebee had done.
Another pop-up faded away. Bumblebee removed his hand again. It was dripping with Prowl's energon.
When another message showed up, he didn't take any less time than before - at least he didn't think he did - to parse its meaning.
Pressure in fuel lines: stable
Stable didn't mean good.
But maybe - his thought was derailed when Bumblebee's hand pressed against another of countless wounds and he did his utmost to hold back another scream of pain - maybe stable could mean not bleeding out. At least not here. Not today.