Ye Olde Halloween Challenge - Pumpkin
Sheesh, I keep forgetting to post the rest of these up here. Anyways, better late than never, so this was the second one, featuring Sideswipe and Ratchet for the prompt of
Pumpkins
“I’ve had it Prowl!” Ratchet banged into the Second-in-Command’s office spewing fire and brimstone and all things slagged. “I’ve had it with that fragging little red demon and his attempts to rip to shreds the last dredges of patience I have left!”
The aforementioned red demon walked into Prowl’s office before the black-and-white could formulate an appropriate reply to the fuming mad CMO. Said red mech then proceeded to look his most innocent, optics going wide as if he had just been accused of some horrific, unmentionable crime.
“Its Halloween weekend Prowl,” he said, as if that explained everything.
It didn’t. Prowl leveled the young warrior with a look that promised its own special version of hell if he so much as caused a doorwing to twitch. Ratchet meanwhile aimed a truly black glare at the red mech and would have probably lept for his throat had Prowl not been standing right there in front of them.
“Do explain,” Prowl dead-panned.
“My med-bay!” Ratchet sputtered. “He,” a red finger thrust out at the equally red perpetrator. “vandalized my med-bay!”
“I did not!” Sideswipe protested. “Its Halloween, I was just decorating it in the spirit of the season with a few props. I didn’t touch any of his stuff, I swear it!”
“He stuck evil-looking pumpkins all over my counters!”
“He never uses his counters, he’s always with his tools and equipment!”
Prowl sighed, feeling a dull throb start in his cranium. He needed to come up with a solution to appease as well as get rid of these two before it blew into a full-fledged headache. Normally he would just penalize Sideswipe and be done with it, but this time he couldn’t really fault the red Lamborghini as nothing he had done directly affected Ratchet’s work, and nothing he had said was false. He glanced down at his desk for a moment the let a hint of a smile play on the corners of his mouth before looking up at the two again.
“Very well,” he said. “After the last battle we’ve had, the sentries that had agreed to take tonights shift at the new construction site are still recuperating. So I need replacements and I think you two will do just nicely.
“Wait, ME?!” Ratchet asked incredulously.
“Someone needs to stay and make sure Sideswipe actually pulls through the whole night’s shift and doesn’t try to sneak off,” Prowl replied calmly. “Report to the site at 2030 hours, and Sideswipe, clean up the med-bay before you go.”
So it was that that night, Lamborghini and Ambulance showed up at the site none too happy about being there, especially the medic. As they cut their headlights and transformed, the entire area plunged into darkness. Ratchet cursed.
“Wonderful. Now I have to sit around here in the dark with no one for company but this red hellspawn.”
“Look on the bright side, at least its not my brother,” Sideswipe commented as he began unspacing the jack o’ lanterns he’d taken from the med-bay.”
“No, see if it was your brother, neither of us would be here, because he’s too obsessed with himself to bother messing up my med-bay.”
“Ouch, tres harsh.”
“Good. And why the slag did you bring those things out here for?”
“I didn’t have time to put them anywhere else before we left.”
He lit one and placed it on a partially built ledge. The eerie orange glow broke the black of the night as the carved grin shone back at the two of them. Ratchet shuddered. Whoever had carved it had done too good a job of making them look as evil as possible. Sideswipe lit another.
“What are you doing?” Ratchet snapped. “Do you want to give the Decepticons a nice big target to shoot at?”
“Relax Doc. Humans are gonna be doing this all over their land. Any ‘Cons flying around will probably think this is yet another farmer’s plot. Besides, at least it breaks up the darkness.”
The medic had to admit that one. With a sigh, he reached for a pumpkin and lit it. “In that case we should probably spread them around. You keep lighting, I’ll go place them and take a look around at the same time.”
“Sure thing Ratch. Just scream if you see anything.”
Ratchet gave him a truly ugly look, then set about randomly placing the lanterns around the site, first around their immediate area, then further away, leaving Sideswipe alone for longer and longer intervals. Once all were lit, he straightened and turned around, then jumped back with a yelp as he came face-to-face with a jack o’ lantern that Ratchet had placed at optic level. He looked around to see if the medic had seen him, then let out a breath and chuckled softly at himself for getting spooked so easily.
He turned back to look at his handiwork and the dozen or so glowing, carved pumpkins grinned back at him. Unable to stop an involuntary shiver, he rubbed his arms against a chill that he wasn’t sure was real or imagined, before turning to look back at the way Ratchet had gone. A glowing pumpkin seemed to hang a little way off, seemingly suspended in mid-air.
“Must’ve hung one on a tree or a beam or something,” he muttered to himself, trying to ignore the tightness in his fuel chambers as he began to move closer to investigate.
The face that grinned back at him didn’t look like one that he or any of the others had carved. This one looked like it was laughing at him. Wait… laughing? Pumpkins couldn’t laugh. It couldn’t have been laughter, just the wind.
“R-Ratchet?” he called.
There was no answer. He took another step. It was glowing pretty brightly for a small stump of a candle.
“What?”
Sideswipe jumped and spun around. “N-nothing.” He back-peddled quickly away from that particularly creepy pumpkin. “Just wondering where you were.”
“Why, scared?” Ratchet asked as he settled down on a ledge.
“No! I just don’t want anything to happen to you out here.”
“I’m touched Sideswipe, here…” the medic held out a cube of high-grade. “Go slow, its supposed to last us a few more hours.”
“Thanks.” Sideswipe sat down next to him, stubbornly keeping his optics facing ahead of him. “I needed that.”
…. When they were finally relieved by the next shift around dawn when the sky was beginning to lighten, Sideswipe finally looked back over his shoulder and saw to his horror that there was neither a tree nor a beam at the spot where he’d seen the jack o’ lantern hanging the night before, and said pumpkin was now resting on the ground, still grinning.
With a gulp, he quickly transformed and sped off, leaving Ratchet and the day shift to wonder just what had gotten into him
~END.