[Transformers: Animated] Mentor
Title: Mentor
Universe: TFA
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairing: Ratchet/Omega Supreme, Arcee, Bulkhead, Sigma Supreme
Word Count: 3618
Warnings: none
Notes: For tf_rare_pairing. One section relies pretty heavily on information from the AllSpark Almanac II.
From the far end of the project hangar, Omega’s mentor looked like nothing more than a speck crawling over his plating. Sigma Supreme watched them surreptitiously while workers swarmed over his own systems, checking over their repairs and making certain that no damage had been missed in the post-battle rush. That was, ostensibly, what Ratchet was doing for Omega right now, but even Sigma recognized that it was as much play for them as anything.
Stifling a sigh, he settled in to wait in silence. Ultra Magnus, of course, was long gone. He’d given orders from Sigma’s command deck until Ratchet and the other medics confirmed that the blast he’d taken portside was non-life-threatening, then disappeared into the depths of Fortress Maximus to convene with his officers. That always happened, of course. The Magnus had many duties to attend to, after all.
Normally, he would fill time by talking to Kappa, who was only a little bit older than him, or to Iota. They were both kind, if boisterous, and sometimes their crews would stay, too. He enjoyed listening to Kappa complain about her assignments, even if he pretended otherwise. Now, however, Kappa was finally on a mission far from Cybertron, deep into colony space, and Iota was gone. He found himself alone for the first time with the oldest of their kind.
Omega always intimidated him a little bit. He was so much older, the only one out of all of them to have met every Omega Sentinel built, and they had rarely spent time together. Sigma had been occupied with carrying the Magnus across Autobot territory from the moment he completed his training, and Omega had his own missions. They simply hadn’t crossed paths much, and when they did, well, it was easier to sit back and let his more gregarious brethren do the talking.
“Ratchet, is that…safe?” asked Omega suddenly, his deep voice booming through the hangar.
Sigma looked closer, careful to keep as still as possible, so that the workers still checking him wouldn’t be jostled. Ratchet was hanging upside-down from Omega’s blaster arm, his magnets keeping his feet in place. Omega seemed torn between concern and amusement, his free hand hovering just below his mentor, ready to catch him if he fell.
Ratchet waved. “It’s perfectly fine! These magnets’ve held up in plenty battles. Just don’t go trying to shake me off, all right?”
“Ratchet!”
Whistling a jaunty tune, Ratchet began walking down Omega’s arm. It was more of a shuffle, really, as he carefully disengaged and re-engaged his magnets with each step. Omega seemed caught between distress and amusement.
Despite himself, Sigma chuckled. The low rumble attracted Omega’s attention, and all that kept Sigma from ducking down and trying to pretend he hadn’t made a sound was the knowledge that the work crew was still combing over his recently-repaired internals and wouldn’t want to be thrown around the cabin.
“You will encourage him,” said Omega, but his tone was fond.
Sigma floundered for a response, but he was saved by a ping from the work crew. “What’s so funny, big guy?”
“Uh,” he said, “Field Tech Ratchet is upside-down?”
There was a long pause. “…Right. Anyway, you’re fully repaired and cleared for duty, Sigma Supreme. We’ll be disembarking shortly.” In the background, Sigma could faintly hear the other workers chattering and laughing amongst themselves.
“Thank you,” he rumbled, snapping open the hatch in his leg so that they could begin filing out onto the catwalks. From his precarious position, Ratchet waved to them as they left the hangar.
“Docbot, you are glitched!” one of them shouted back, “I’m telling Wheeljack on you.”
Ratchet merely shrugged. “Go ahead, he’ll think it’s funny.”
When they were gone, Sigma shook out the stiffness in his joints and sat on the hangar floor, leaning against the wall. It was hard, sometimes, holding still while he was in robot mode, but the workers didn’t go into battle with him the way Ultra Magnus did, so they weren’t used to trying to navigate his corridors while he was moving. He’d startled a lot of them, during his first few cycles of life, until someone had finally explained how to lock his joints. It wasn’t terribly comfortable, but the others never seemed to have much trouble with it. Omega probably hadn’t needed any explanations at all.
“Sigma?”
He tried not to jump, though a bot of his size had little hope of disguising a startle response. Omega was looking at him, and Ratchet, too, from his perch halfway up the barrel of Omega’s blaster. “Yes?” he responded meekly. He hadn’t done something to bother them, had he?
“Do you want to talk? I do not see you much.”
“Um,” said Sigma, “all right.” It would not do to blow off the oldest Omega Sentinel, after all! Kappa would be very frustrated with him, if nothing else. “What do you want to talk about?”
Of course, what he ended up doing was listen. That was all right. That was normal, even. He always listened to Ultra Magnus when he gave orders, or when he talked about the Autobot cause and their duty to protect, and he listened to Kappa when she complained about never seeing any action, and sometimes he listened to the workers, or the other Autobots who came and went, though they did not seem to realize that he was paying attention. They talked fast, the smaller Autobots, and they used words he didn’t understand quite frequently, but he’d learned a bit. Listening was easy enough. Now he listened to Omega and Ratchet talk to each other about everything: the planet they’d been to, the ones Ratchet had seen before the war and the ones neither of them had ever laid optics on, other bots in the Project and those outside, the war and what might come after.
Omega turned to him, the blue of his optics bright through his orange shield, and asked, “What do you want to do after the war?”
Sigma felt as if the bottom had fallen out of his spark chamber. After the war? Could there even be an after? He supposed that there must be, if he and the others did their jobs and the Autobots won, but he’d never really thought about it. He was made for this war, he knew that, just like Kappa and Iota and even Omega himself.
“I don’t know,” he admitted when the silence dragged on too long for even the Omega Sentinels, “I did not think…” he gestured helplessly. Ratchet was frowning at him and he tried not to look ashamed. Was it dumb of him, that he didn’t know?
Omega simply made an understanding noise and nodded. “I think I would like to have a crew,” he said, “A small one, like the others have. More bots to talk to.”
Ratchet snorted, “Bah, you just want someone around to drive me crazy!”
“You can talk to them, too,” Omega replied serenely, “And we can explore with them, maybe.”
Sigma thought about all the planets he’d seen, as they liberated Cybertronian colonies from the Decepticons one by one. He rarely stayed in one place, usually saw nothing more of the surface than whatever spaceport was still in good enough repair to land in. He hadn’t liked it much. But if he could go to a planet without Decepticons, see the cities where normal Autobots lived, see what he had been built to preserve?
“I might like that,” he said, and Omega smiled at him. He had not realized that the design of their faceplates allowed for such a bright expression.
Eventually, of course, even Ratchet had to leave. He received a comm. From Wheeljack, the chatty engineer who saw to their weapons, and sped into the depths of Fortress Maximus muttering curses under his breath. That left Sigma alone with Omega and the awkward silence descended on them again. Sigma couldn’t stop thinking of what Omega had told him, his dreams for the future. If he went exploring, then certainly Ratchet would go with him, even if he never had a crew. They could see the stars together. He tried to imagine taking Ultra Magnus out to the edge of the Commonwealth, bringing him to peaceful planets where it was quiet and they could talk about something other than the war, but it seemed too ridiculous. The Magnus could not abandon all the duties that kept him holed up in Fortress Maximus just to see the starts any more than a weapon could hope to find a purpose in peacetime.
“You are lucky,” Sigma blurted.
Omega looked at him quizzically, “Why?”
“Because,” he said with a bitterness that surprised him, “you have someone who would miss you if you deactivated.”
“Ultra Magnus would miss you.”
Sigma shrugged, his gaze fixed on the tangle of scaffolding the workers used whenever they needed to work on the Sentinels’ outer hulls. He jumped, again, when he felt a touch on his arm. Omega was reaching across the catwalks towards him, his EM field fuzzing against Sigma’s plating tentatively.
“I would miss you, too,” he said gently.
Bulkhead drove clear up to the base entrance before transforming. It was quiet, for once; he’d left Ratchet working on the space bridge on Sumdac Tower, and Bumblebee was out on patrol with the boss bot. Only Prowl was left back at base, keeping an optic on the monitors. He nodded when Bulkhead came in, but didn’t say anything, which Bulkhead appreciated. That was the great thing about Prowl, as long as you didn’t bother him, he wouldn’t bother you. Bumblebee just thought it made him an anti-social glitch, of course, but it really was nice to have a few hours of politely ignoring each other.
Trundling into his own room, Bulkhead surveyed the mess that made up his “studio” with some dismay. There were cans of paint and medium stacked everywhere, rolls of canvas flopped over piles of scrap metal he’d collected to sculpt with, and the dropcloth he’d put down over the concrete floor hadn’t quite managed to catch all his paint scatter. He probably ought to clean up some, but after spending all day trying not to shout at either Ratchet or Professor Sumdac, he really didn’t feel up to it.
Instead, he stretched and prepped a new canvas. He’d had a lot of trouble with that, before, since his fingers weren’t exactly designed for fine work, but it was the only way to get a format big enough to really work with, and compared to all the delicate wiring he’d been doing on the space bridge it was easy.
Painting was getting to be a lot easier now that he’d stopped trying to power through hundreds of stellar cycles’ worth of human art movements. Before the whole botnapping thing, he’d been so frustrated because he just couldn’t get the hang of it, couldn’t make his lines neat and clean, couldn’t make any of the others understand what was so appealing about the whole thing. Even Sari had started to lose interest after that first big gallery show. Now, though, he mostly used it as a way to relax, and he found that just letting go and not thinking too much about how other artists did stuff made his own work more natural.
He began by blocking in simple shapes, sketching out a composition. He usually didn’t do figurative things without a model or a reference, but humans were shaped pretty differently from Cybertronians, when you got down to details, and he had a pretty strong image in his head, anyway.
When he’d left Sumdac Tower, Ratchet was bent over the half-built control panel, grumbling to himself. That wasn’t really unusual, Ratchet grumbled about pretty much everything, but the urgency with which he was wiring the controls reminded Bulkhead of another incident, long before they’d crashed on Earth: Ratchet bent over the Orion’s console, faceplates tight with worry, like he was working on a patient and not a dilapidated ship. It made a lot more sense now than it had then.
Usually he was pretty good about not breaking stuff on shipboard, and anyway Cybertronian equipment wasn’t as delicate as Earth stuff, but Bumblebee got bored really easily, and somehow he always managed to talk Bulkhead into doing things with him. It wasn’t so bad when they were actually working on a bridge, since they could go out and race around whatever piece of rock it was built on, but when they were in deep space…
It was the first and only time they ever raced in vehicle mode on the ship. They hadn’t meant to hurt anything, of course not! But somehow, Bumblebee caromed off of Bulkhead’s side while trying to pass him and skidded straight into the captain’s console.
He’d never seen Ratchet so furious.
Ratchet got mad at them all the time, especially at Bumblebee, and he yelled a lot, enough that Bulkhead had been a little bit afraid of him. He’d never yelled like that, with a sharp edge in it, like panic. He’d never sounded that hurt before.
Bulkhead frowned, mulling over the cans of paint. He picked out a few colors, red for Ratchet’s plating, a few blues for the deep shadows, and began refining the figure. Optimus hadn’t even made the two of them stay and help clean up the mess, just herded them out so that Ratchet could work on the repairs alone. He supposed Ratchet must have told him at some point that his ship was really Omega Supreme, since he was Prime and all. It sort of hurt that no one had let him in on the secret, but he supposed that it was all mixed up in Elite Guard business or something.
He’d felt bad about it back then, especially since he’d upset Ratchet so much. Looking back, he felt worse about it now. If Omega had been awake, that probably would have hurt. He’d waited until everyone had calmed down some, deep into the recharge cycle, and then he’d slipped out of his too-small quarters to check on Ratchet.
He could be sort of quiet if he wanted to, sometimes, and he hadn’t wanted to cause another disturbance, so he managed to peek onto the command deck without Ratchet hearing him. He’d meant to apologize and ask if there was anything he could do, cleaning maybe, but when he saw Ratchet he stopped short. It was… odd.
Ratchet was bent close over the panel, treating the wires gently, as if they belonged to another Autobot. He kept running his hands over the edge of the console, like maybe it was in pain, and he was humming very quietly. The tune wasn’t something Bulkhead was familiar with; it sounded a little bit like some cheery old pre-war song, but the slow, quiet way Ratchet was humming it made it sound sad. Occasionally a spark would jump, or the medic’s fingers would slip, and he would stop humming to apologize.
“Sorry, old friend. I’m sorry. You deserve better than this.”
Bulkhead had tiptoed back down the corridor, then turned and stomped up again, loud, so that Ratchet couldn’t help but hear him. When he stumbled out on deck, Ratchet was back to his usual grumpy self.
How did you paint a song? Bulkhead tapped his chin with his brush, which got paint all over it, but he didn’t mind. The lights on deck had been bright, obviously, so that Ratchet could see what he was doing, but he loaded up his brush with blues and purples, throwing everything into shadow. The other stations on deck didn’t matter so much, just dark shapes in the background, so he left them as bluish blotches while he worked on Ratchet’s workplace. Instead of having the light come from overhead, he let the buttons and Ratchet’s arc welder make a bright patch, a little cell of warmer colors sheltered under Ratchet’s frame.
Optimus would probably say that it wasn’t a good representation of what had happened, because the lights and things weren’t accurate. Ratchet would probably agree, if he cared to comment at all. Still, though, as Bulkhead stepped back to survey his work, he was pleased. He’d seen a few human paintings that reminded him a little of this, ones from before electricity, when all they’d had were those candle things. They didn’t seem like very good lamps, but their small circle of light made everything seem more intimate. The brightness of the arc welder lit up Ratchet’s face, his expression focused and melancholy, his body bent tenderly over the panel.
Bulkhead signed the canvas with his glyph, in the corner where it wouldn’t interfere with the composition. He thought about showing the picture to the others, but quickly decided against it. It still felt a little too raw. Maybe after they got Omega Supreme back.
Arcee walked down the hall, as always caught between familiarity and strangeness in the ship she had been intended to mentor. In preparation for her mission, she had memorized Omega Supreme’s layout, familiarized herself with every corridor, every room and control panel, though she had, of course, never seen him. Now that she had her processors back, she could walk the length and breadth of Omega’s alt mode blind, if she’d wanted to.
Still, being inside a living ship was nothing like the normal vehicles she’d learned to pilot. She could feel the faint press of his EM field all around her, not intrusive, but a definite presence throughout his frame. She’d felt a brief flicker of warmth, like sunlight on plating, when she’d greeted him, but so far he was quiet. Presumably he was busy talking to Ratchet.
She checked in the shipboard repair bay, but it was empty and abandoned. Not surprising, considering the shell of the cyber-ninja Prowl had rested there for the duration of their trip back to Cybertron. Most of Omega Supreme’s tiny crew tiptoed around the place as if they expected his ghost to still be sleeping there. That meant Ratchet was likely in the control room.
It was always strange, seeing Ratchet working with Omega. She’d trained so long, spent stellar cycles preparing to mentor this living weapon, and yet here she was watching an unprepared medic do her job. It disoriented her every time, seeing her job filled by someone else, watching him perform the maintenance tasks she’d learned. It was rather like being a ghost. Ratchet stood precariously on the seat from the command console, deep in Omega’s databanks. Omega was humming something, a tune Arcee vaguely remembered from before the war, his voice so deep it scraped the bottom of her hearing.
“Haven’t heard that one in a while,” said Ratchet, smiling. Around her, he was always so cautious, like he was afraid she would slip away if he pushed too hard, and around his younger crewmates he grumbled and blustered and generally acted older than he really was. Their time in the bounty hunter’s ship had obviously weighed heavily on him the last four million stellar cycles. Here, though, alone with Omega Supreme, he was relaxed. His movements were gentle and familiar, a bot letting himself relax in the presence of an old friend.
Omega let the last note drag out in a noise of agreement. “I lost the middle part, for a while,” he said at length, “but I think Sari’s last repair brought it back.”
“Ah.” Ratchet paused in his work, leaning his helm against Omega’s memory banks. His hand stroked over the controls, as of soothing an injured bot. “I’m glad,” he murmured. His vocalizer caught on static for a moment, and Arcee had to bite back a sigh. She hadn’t expected to ever see what became of the medic when she coded the failsafe to his energy signature. Watching him now, she felt guilty.
“Ratchet?” she called, and when he glanced up at her, her processor flashed back to the look on his face just before his EMP went critical. She’d fixed his image in her permanent memory so that the failsafe could be triggered, so she was intimately aware of the jagged edge of his broken chevron, worn with time but clearly never repaired, of the way his chassis had aged beyond expectation. He couldn’t have been much older than her, but he looked tired.
Still, he smiled when he saw her, awkward but pleased. “Hello, Arcee. What brings you down here? Sari get to be too much for you?”
She laughed, “Oh, no, Sari’s no trouble. I thought I might visit, if that’s all right with you two.”
“Yes,” said Omega, and Ratchet smiled and pat his memory banks again.
“It’s fine. We were just working on salvaging a few memory files.
“I see.” Arcee stepped into the room, leaning on the control console. It was noticeably warmer in here, like when she’d felt Omega’s attention in the hall, and his field flickered curiously over the surface of hers. “I heard you singing, Omega. Do you like music?”
“Oh, yes!” he replied, the lights brightening with his pleasure, “Ratchet taught me many songs when I was bored or lonely. He sings, too,” he added slyly.
Arcee laughed. “Does he?” she grinned as Ratchet shook his head vigorously, “Would he care to demonstrate?
He did not, in fact, care to, but Omega teased and pleaded until finally he relented. Nothing in Arcee’s briefing had talked about the Omega Sentinels having a sense of humor, or about the sort of closeness she could see between Ratchet and Omega, tender and attentive. She could not help but feel that she’d missed something.
Universe: TFA
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairing: Ratchet/Omega Supreme, Arcee, Bulkhead, Sigma Supreme
Word Count: 3618
Warnings: none
Notes: For tf_rare_pairing. One section relies pretty heavily on information from the AllSpark Almanac II.
From the far end of the project hangar, Omega’s mentor looked like nothing more than a speck crawling over his plating. Sigma Supreme watched them surreptitiously while workers swarmed over his own systems, checking over their repairs and making certain that no damage had been missed in the post-battle rush. That was, ostensibly, what Ratchet was doing for Omega right now, but even Sigma recognized that it was as much play for them as anything.
Stifling a sigh, he settled in to wait in silence. Ultra Magnus, of course, was long gone. He’d given orders from Sigma’s command deck until Ratchet and the other medics confirmed that the blast he’d taken portside was non-life-threatening, then disappeared into the depths of Fortress Maximus to convene with his officers. That always happened, of course. The Magnus had many duties to attend to, after all.
Normally, he would fill time by talking to Kappa, who was only a little bit older than him, or to Iota. They were both kind, if boisterous, and sometimes their crews would stay, too. He enjoyed listening to Kappa complain about her assignments, even if he pretended otherwise. Now, however, Kappa was finally on a mission far from Cybertron, deep into colony space, and Iota was gone. He found himself alone for the first time with the oldest of their kind.
Omega always intimidated him a little bit. He was so much older, the only one out of all of them to have met every Omega Sentinel built, and they had rarely spent time together. Sigma had been occupied with carrying the Magnus across Autobot territory from the moment he completed his training, and Omega had his own missions. They simply hadn’t crossed paths much, and when they did, well, it was easier to sit back and let his more gregarious brethren do the talking.
“Ratchet, is that…safe?” asked Omega suddenly, his deep voice booming through the hangar.
Sigma looked closer, careful to keep as still as possible, so that the workers still checking him wouldn’t be jostled. Ratchet was hanging upside-down from Omega’s blaster arm, his magnets keeping his feet in place. Omega seemed torn between concern and amusement, his free hand hovering just below his mentor, ready to catch him if he fell.
Ratchet waved. “It’s perfectly fine! These magnets’ve held up in plenty battles. Just don’t go trying to shake me off, all right?”
“Ratchet!”
Whistling a jaunty tune, Ratchet began walking down Omega’s arm. It was more of a shuffle, really, as he carefully disengaged and re-engaged his magnets with each step. Omega seemed caught between distress and amusement.
Despite himself, Sigma chuckled. The low rumble attracted Omega’s attention, and all that kept Sigma from ducking down and trying to pretend he hadn’t made a sound was the knowledge that the work crew was still combing over his recently-repaired internals and wouldn’t want to be thrown around the cabin.
“You will encourage him,” said Omega, but his tone was fond.
Sigma floundered for a response, but he was saved by a ping from the work crew. “What’s so funny, big guy?”
“Uh,” he said, “Field Tech Ratchet is upside-down?”
There was a long pause. “…Right. Anyway, you’re fully repaired and cleared for duty, Sigma Supreme. We’ll be disembarking shortly.” In the background, Sigma could faintly hear the other workers chattering and laughing amongst themselves.
“Thank you,” he rumbled, snapping open the hatch in his leg so that they could begin filing out onto the catwalks. From his precarious position, Ratchet waved to them as they left the hangar.
“Docbot, you are glitched!” one of them shouted back, “I’m telling Wheeljack on you.”
Ratchet merely shrugged. “Go ahead, he’ll think it’s funny.”
When they were gone, Sigma shook out the stiffness in his joints and sat on the hangar floor, leaning against the wall. It was hard, sometimes, holding still while he was in robot mode, but the workers didn’t go into battle with him the way Ultra Magnus did, so they weren’t used to trying to navigate his corridors while he was moving. He’d startled a lot of them, during his first few cycles of life, until someone had finally explained how to lock his joints. It wasn’t terribly comfortable, but the others never seemed to have much trouble with it. Omega probably hadn’t needed any explanations at all.
“Sigma?”
He tried not to jump, though a bot of his size had little hope of disguising a startle response. Omega was looking at him, and Ratchet, too, from his perch halfway up the barrel of Omega’s blaster. “Yes?” he responded meekly. He hadn’t done something to bother them, had he?
“Do you want to talk? I do not see you much.”
“Um,” said Sigma, “all right.” It would not do to blow off the oldest Omega Sentinel, after all! Kappa would be very frustrated with him, if nothing else. “What do you want to talk about?”
Of course, what he ended up doing was listen. That was all right. That was normal, even. He always listened to Ultra Magnus when he gave orders, or when he talked about the Autobot cause and their duty to protect, and he listened to Kappa when she complained about never seeing any action, and sometimes he listened to the workers, or the other Autobots who came and went, though they did not seem to realize that he was paying attention. They talked fast, the smaller Autobots, and they used words he didn’t understand quite frequently, but he’d learned a bit. Listening was easy enough. Now he listened to Omega and Ratchet talk to each other about everything: the planet they’d been to, the ones Ratchet had seen before the war and the ones neither of them had ever laid optics on, other bots in the Project and those outside, the war and what might come after.
Omega turned to him, the blue of his optics bright through his orange shield, and asked, “What do you want to do after the war?”
Sigma felt as if the bottom had fallen out of his spark chamber. After the war? Could there even be an after? He supposed that there must be, if he and the others did their jobs and the Autobots won, but he’d never really thought about it. He was made for this war, he knew that, just like Kappa and Iota and even Omega himself.
“I don’t know,” he admitted when the silence dragged on too long for even the Omega Sentinels, “I did not think…” he gestured helplessly. Ratchet was frowning at him and he tried not to look ashamed. Was it dumb of him, that he didn’t know?
Omega simply made an understanding noise and nodded. “I think I would like to have a crew,” he said, “A small one, like the others have. More bots to talk to.”
Ratchet snorted, “Bah, you just want someone around to drive me crazy!”
“You can talk to them, too,” Omega replied serenely, “And we can explore with them, maybe.”
Sigma thought about all the planets he’d seen, as they liberated Cybertronian colonies from the Decepticons one by one. He rarely stayed in one place, usually saw nothing more of the surface than whatever spaceport was still in good enough repair to land in. He hadn’t liked it much. But if he could go to a planet without Decepticons, see the cities where normal Autobots lived, see what he had been built to preserve?
“I might like that,” he said, and Omega smiled at him. He had not realized that the design of their faceplates allowed for such a bright expression.
Eventually, of course, even Ratchet had to leave. He received a comm. From Wheeljack, the chatty engineer who saw to their weapons, and sped into the depths of Fortress Maximus muttering curses under his breath. That left Sigma alone with Omega and the awkward silence descended on them again. Sigma couldn’t stop thinking of what Omega had told him, his dreams for the future. If he went exploring, then certainly Ratchet would go with him, even if he never had a crew. They could see the stars together. He tried to imagine taking Ultra Magnus out to the edge of the Commonwealth, bringing him to peaceful planets where it was quiet and they could talk about something other than the war, but it seemed too ridiculous. The Magnus could not abandon all the duties that kept him holed up in Fortress Maximus just to see the starts any more than a weapon could hope to find a purpose in peacetime.
“You are lucky,” Sigma blurted.
Omega looked at him quizzically, “Why?”
“Because,” he said with a bitterness that surprised him, “you have someone who would miss you if you deactivated.”
“Ultra Magnus would miss you.”
Sigma shrugged, his gaze fixed on the tangle of scaffolding the workers used whenever they needed to work on the Sentinels’ outer hulls. He jumped, again, when he felt a touch on his arm. Omega was reaching across the catwalks towards him, his EM field fuzzing against Sigma’s plating tentatively.
“I would miss you, too,” he said gently.
Bulkhead drove clear up to the base entrance before transforming. It was quiet, for once; he’d left Ratchet working on the space bridge on Sumdac Tower, and Bumblebee was out on patrol with the boss bot. Only Prowl was left back at base, keeping an optic on the monitors. He nodded when Bulkhead came in, but didn’t say anything, which Bulkhead appreciated. That was the great thing about Prowl, as long as you didn’t bother him, he wouldn’t bother you. Bumblebee just thought it made him an anti-social glitch, of course, but it really was nice to have a few hours of politely ignoring each other.
Trundling into his own room, Bulkhead surveyed the mess that made up his “studio” with some dismay. There were cans of paint and medium stacked everywhere, rolls of canvas flopped over piles of scrap metal he’d collected to sculpt with, and the dropcloth he’d put down over the concrete floor hadn’t quite managed to catch all his paint scatter. He probably ought to clean up some, but after spending all day trying not to shout at either Ratchet or Professor Sumdac, he really didn’t feel up to it.
Instead, he stretched and prepped a new canvas. He’d had a lot of trouble with that, before, since his fingers weren’t exactly designed for fine work, but it was the only way to get a format big enough to really work with, and compared to all the delicate wiring he’d been doing on the space bridge it was easy.
Painting was getting to be a lot easier now that he’d stopped trying to power through hundreds of stellar cycles’ worth of human art movements. Before the whole botnapping thing, he’d been so frustrated because he just couldn’t get the hang of it, couldn’t make his lines neat and clean, couldn’t make any of the others understand what was so appealing about the whole thing. Even Sari had started to lose interest after that first big gallery show. Now, though, he mostly used it as a way to relax, and he found that just letting go and not thinking too much about how other artists did stuff made his own work more natural.
He began by blocking in simple shapes, sketching out a composition. He usually didn’t do figurative things without a model or a reference, but humans were shaped pretty differently from Cybertronians, when you got down to details, and he had a pretty strong image in his head, anyway.
When he’d left Sumdac Tower, Ratchet was bent over the half-built control panel, grumbling to himself. That wasn’t really unusual, Ratchet grumbled about pretty much everything, but the urgency with which he was wiring the controls reminded Bulkhead of another incident, long before they’d crashed on Earth: Ratchet bent over the Orion’s console, faceplates tight with worry, like he was working on a patient and not a dilapidated ship. It made a lot more sense now than it had then.
Usually he was pretty good about not breaking stuff on shipboard, and anyway Cybertronian equipment wasn’t as delicate as Earth stuff, but Bumblebee got bored really easily, and somehow he always managed to talk Bulkhead into doing things with him. It wasn’t so bad when they were actually working on a bridge, since they could go out and race around whatever piece of rock it was built on, but when they were in deep space…
It was the first and only time they ever raced in vehicle mode on the ship. They hadn’t meant to hurt anything, of course not! But somehow, Bumblebee caromed off of Bulkhead’s side while trying to pass him and skidded straight into the captain’s console.
He’d never seen Ratchet so furious.
Ratchet got mad at them all the time, especially at Bumblebee, and he yelled a lot, enough that Bulkhead had been a little bit afraid of him. He’d never yelled like that, with a sharp edge in it, like panic. He’d never sounded that hurt before.
Bulkhead frowned, mulling over the cans of paint. He picked out a few colors, red for Ratchet’s plating, a few blues for the deep shadows, and began refining the figure. Optimus hadn’t even made the two of them stay and help clean up the mess, just herded them out so that Ratchet could work on the repairs alone. He supposed Ratchet must have told him at some point that his ship was really Omega Supreme, since he was Prime and all. It sort of hurt that no one had let him in on the secret, but he supposed that it was all mixed up in Elite Guard business or something.
He’d felt bad about it back then, especially since he’d upset Ratchet so much. Looking back, he felt worse about it now. If Omega had been awake, that probably would have hurt. He’d waited until everyone had calmed down some, deep into the recharge cycle, and then he’d slipped out of his too-small quarters to check on Ratchet.
He could be sort of quiet if he wanted to, sometimes, and he hadn’t wanted to cause another disturbance, so he managed to peek onto the command deck without Ratchet hearing him. He’d meant to apologize and ask if there was anything he could do, cleaning maybe, but when he saw Ratchet he stopped short. It was… odd.
Ratchet was bent close over the panel, treating the wires gently, as if they belonged to another Autobot. He kept running his hands over the edge of the console, like maybe it was in pain, and he was humming very quietly. The tune wasn’t something Bulkhead was familiar with; it sounded a little bit like some cheery old pre-war song, but the slow, quiet way Ratchet was humming it made it sound sad. Occasionally a spark would jump, or the medic’s fingers would slip, and he would stop humming to apologize.
“Sorry, old friend. I’m sorry. You deserve better than this.”
Bulkhead had tiptoed back down the corridor, then turned and stomped up again, loud, so that Ratchet couldn’t help but hear him. When he stumbled out on deck, Ratchet was back to his usual grumpy self.
How did you paint a song? Bulkhead tapped his chin with his brush, which got paint all over it, but he didn’t mind. The lights on deck had been bright, obviously, so that Ratchet could see what he was doing, but he loaded up his brush with blues and purples, throwing everything into shadow. The other stations on deck didn’t matter so much, just dark shapes in the background, so he left them as bluish blotches while he worked on Ratchet’s workplace. Instead of having the light come from overhead, he let the buttons and Ratchet’s arc welder make a bright patch, a little cell of warmer colors sheltered under Ratchet’s frame.
Optimus would probably say that it wasn’t a good representation of what had happened, because the lights and things weren’t accurate. Ratchet would probably agree, if he cared to comment at all. Still, though, as Bulkhead stepped back to survey his work, he was pleased. He’d seen a few human paintings that reminded him a little of this, ones from before electricity, when all they’d had were those candle things. They didn’t seem like very good lamps, but their small circle of light made everything seem more intimate. The brightness of the arc welder lit up Ratchet’s face, his expression focused and melancholy, his body bent tenderly over the panel.
Bulkhead signed the canvas with his glyph, in the corner where it wouldn’t interfere with the composition. He thought about showing the picture to the others, but quickly decided against it. It still felt a little too raw. Maybe after they got Omega Supreme back.
Arcee walked down the hall, as always caught between familiarity and strangeness in the ship she had been intended to mentor. In preparation for her mission, she had memorized Omega Supreme’s layout, familiarized herself with every corridor, every room and control panel, though she had, of course, never seen him. Now that she had her processors back, she could walk the length and breadth of Omega’s alt mode blind, if she’d wanted to.
Still, being inside a living ship was nothing like the normal vehicles she’d learned to pilot. She could feel the faint press of his EM field all around her, not intrusive, but a definite presence throughout his frame. She’d felt a brief flicker of warmth, like sunlight on plating, when she’d greeted him, but so far he was quiet. Presumably he was busy talking to Ratchet.
She checked in the shipboard repair bay, but it was empty and abandoned. Not surprising, considering the shell of the cyber-ninja Prowl had rested there for the duration of their trip back to Cybertron. Most of Omega Supreme’s tiny crew tiptoed around the place as if they expected his ghost to still be sleeping there. That meant Ratchet was likely in the control room.
It was always strange, seeing Ratchet working with Omega. She’d trained so long, spent stellar cycles preparing to mentor this living weapon, and yet here she was watching an unprepared medic do her job. It disoriented her every time, seeing her job filled by someone else, watching him perform the maintenance tasks she’d learned. It was rather like being a ghost. Ratchet stood precariously on the seat from the command console, deep in Omega’s databanks. Omega was humming something, a tune Arcee vaguely remembered from before the war, his voice so deep it scraped the bottom of her hearing.
“Haven’t heard that one in a while,” said Ratchet, smiling. Around her, he was always so cautious, like he was afraid she would slip away if he pushed too hard, and around his younger crewmates he grumbled and blustered and generally acted older than he really was. Their time in the bounty hunter’s ship had obviously weighed heavily on him the last four million stellar cycles. Here, though, alone with Omega Supreme, he was relaxed. His movements were gentle and familiar, a bot letting himself relax in the presence of an old friend.
Omega let the last note drag out in a noise of agreement. “I lost the middle part, for a while,” he said at length, “but I think Sari’s last repair brought it back.”
“Ah.” Ratchet paused in his work, leaning his helm against Omega’s memory banks. His hand stroked over the controls, as of soothing an injured bot. “I’m glad,” he murmured. His vocalizer caught on static for a moment, and Arcee had to bite back a sigh. She hadn’t expected to ever see what became of the medic when she coded the failsafe to his energy signature. Watching him now, she felt guilty.
“Ratchet?” she called, and when he glanced up at her, her processor flashed back to the look on his face just before his EMP went critical. She’d fixed his image in her permanent memory so that the failsafe could be triggered, so she was intimately aware of the jagged edge of his broken chevron, worn with time but clearly never repaired, of the way his chassis had aged beyond expectation. He couldn’t have been much older than her, but he looked tired.
Still, he smiled when he saw her, awkward but pleased. “Hello, Arcee. What brings you down here? Sari get to be too much for you?”
She laughed, “Oh, no, Sari’s no trouble. I thought I might visit, if that’s all right with you two.”
“Yes,” said Omega, and Ratchet smiled and pat his memory banks again.
“It’s fine. We were just working on salvaging a few memory files.
“I see.” Arcee stepped into the room, leaning on the control console. It was noticeably warmer in here, like when she’d felt Omega’s attention in the hall, and his field flickered curiously over the surface of hers. “I heard you singing, Omega. Do you like music?”
“Oh, yes!” he replied, the lights brightening with his pleasure, “Ratchet taught me many songs when I was bored or lonely. He sings, too,” he added slyly.
Arcee laughed. “Does he?” she grinned as Ratchet shook his head vigorously, “Would he care to demonstrate?
He did not, in fact, care to, but Omega teased and pleaded until finally he relented. Nothing in Arcee’s briefing had talked about the Omega Sentinels having a sense of humor, or about the sort of closeness she could see between Ratchet and Omega, tender and attentive. She could not help but feel that she’d missed something.