Kick in the Head - Transfer Student
Title: Kick in the Head - Transfer Student
Fandom: Transformers
Characters/pairings: Ratchet, Wheeljack
Rating: PG-13
Summary: He'd never needed convincing to be an Autobot. Others were not so sure.
Warnings: Violence
Notes: As of now, this is by far the longest piece in this series. Neither of 'em wanted to shut up :D
Written almost totally to get into a side of Wheeljack's mind that's not the 'snarking at Ironhide' or 'making Ratchet scream his name' sectors.
Table of Contents
o o o
When Ratchet regained consciousness, it was to the sight of a patched ceiling and enough alarms in his processor to make him wonder if his arm was completely gone or merely crushed. And music.
Warily, he sat up, surveying the area. It appeared to be a makeshift repair bay, one wall lined with mechs in various stages of injury and disease. The space was small and cramped but clean, and the recharging mechs around him showed signs of inexperienced but careful treatment.
He showed the same signs. His arm was mangled but still there, and while the functionality alarms in his processor were loud and clear, the pain signals had been dialed down. His caretaker wasn't a medic, then; medics had the codes to completely shut down the pain reception node. An engineer, maybe, or perhaps just a frame modifier, judging by the nature of the welds closing off his ruptured energon lines. And clearly not a Decepticon, unless they were a VERY strange one, since he was alive and whole and not being turned over to the high command for interrogation.
Unnerved, Ratchet stood up, gingerly testing his strength. There had been an attack on a neutral city, well outside of any Autobot or Decepticon controlled territory, and he'd gone out with the rescue squad to answer the blind request for assistance. A trap had been set around the city, and the last thing Ratchet remembered was diving over a mech he didn't recognize while Seeker fire lit up everything around him. Testing his comm lines, he found them functional, but the signal bounced back to him, blocked by some kind of shield beyond the walls of the room. Frowning, he cast out, finding the shield and prodding it's defenses. Signal-tight, incredibly good programming that didn't let out a single blip.
The music grew louder, and a small white mech came around the corner, the music following him from some unobtrusive speakers set in the wall. He didn't exactly dance with the music, the way several mechs Ratchet knew did, but he did move with it, a subtle flexing of his frame to the beat. He paused when he saw Ratchet, glowing panels set into the sides of his head brightening minutely. "So that's you prodding my shields," the mech said, his tone casual and friendly. "Thought so. I didn't expect you to be up for a while yet."
"I heal quickly," Ratchet replied, too stiff compared to the friendliness the other mech was showing, but friendship could be faked. "Where am I?"
The white mech gestured around, showing off a hand with more than the usual number of fingers. "Welcome to the neutral city of Krasyx," he said wryly. "Or, what's left of it. We're in a shelter some distance beneath the lowest building foundations."
Ratchet narrowed his optics suspiciously. Neutrals didn't just rescue mechs that weren't their own, too afraid of getting labeled as sympathizers to either side of the war. "Why am I here, then?" he asked. "Taking in an injured Autobot isn't usually the smartest thing to do when the Decepticons know where you live."
There was a tension to the room now, not just from the white mech but from the others, and Ratchet got the feeling that most of the others were only pretending to still be in recharge. The white mech shrugged, somehow looking unconcerned though the lower half of his face was nearly featureless. "When I found you," he said. "You were curled around Highrush. You were protecting him, even though he wasn't an Autobot. And I know what those markings are; you're a medic. Medics don't kill."
"That distinction is becoming less practical with every passing vorn," Ratchet pointed out, his spark twisting even though he knew it to be true. The white mech flinched, and Ratchet felt like kicking himself. "I appreciate the rescue, though," he continued. "Would you be so kind as to direct me past your shields, so that I may contact my people?"
"No." Blithe to stony in a second. "The city above is still occupied. After your rescue group was taken out, the Autobots sent in a full squadron. The fighting is desperate, and I will not risk the lives of all of those here. We're staying put until the area is cleared out."
"I don't want to invite them down here," Ratchet argued. "I want to let them know I am still alive. I can leave under my own power and try to get back to the Autobots alone."
"Oh, sure," another mech spoke up, his voice laced with heavy sarcasm. "We'll just let you waltz out and hope that none of those damned soldiers up there see where you come out at. And then we can sit here and wait for you to come back with your Autobot buddies to clear us out."
Cold fury welled around Ratchet's spark. The white mech looked stricken at the other mech's words, but Ratchet ignored him. "The Autobots," he hissed. "Respect the rights of all mechs on Cybertron. The entire reason Optimus Prime is opposing Megatron is because Megatron does not see those weaker than him as creatures worth living. We wouldn't massacre a neutral group any more than we would kill off a city of Autobot sympathizers."
"Unless, of course, you heard that there might be a Decepticon in hiding among them," someone sneered softly.
Ratchet's hand clenched hard enough for the metal of his palm to protest. Tamping down the urge to turn on the derisive neutral, he quickly walked out out of the room, shouldering past the white mech as he went. The room didn't so much end as narrow into a curving hallway, branching off at various angles to other rooms. Ratchet paid the off-shoots no mind, his processor a furious whirl. How dare they! To think that Optimus Prime would condone a slaughter, to think that they would wipe an entire city off of the map because of a rumor of a Decepticon- Ratchet stopped, leaning his forehead against the silica bedrock that formed the walls, trying to regain control over the disgusted rage that swamped his processor.
"Hey."
He looked up. The white mech, looking profoundly distressed, stood just up the hallway. This close, Ratchet could see that his face may have once been not as featureless; there were old scorch marks, and welds at the edges of the smooth plate that fitted over where his mouth should have been, implying an old injury that may have blown off the bottom half of his face. The mech raised his hands, then dropped them helplessly. "Please do not hate them," he said, the glass-covered plasma on his head flickering in time with his words. "They... you know your cause, you know why you fight. We only see the propaganda and backlash."
Abruptly, Ratchet felt tired; tired of fighting, tired of the war, tired of trying to hold onto the oaths he'd taken as a medic when the entire world seemed out to push him into breaking them. "We don't massacre neutrals," he said thickly, talking more to the wall than to the white mech. "Optimus Prime would personally execute any officer who gave an order to do so."
"But we get stuck in the cross-fire just the same," the other countered quietly. "You're expecting to get fired at. You chose to get fired at. We chose to stay out, and we die anyway."
Like Krasyx. It held no affiliation with either side, and it was not any kind of a strategic benefit. Purely neutral, and now it was a battlezone. Ratchet thumped his good fist against the wall, not even denting the hard silica. "I'm sorry," he half-whispered.
A shrug, so much of the expression in his hands. "It's not yours to be sorry about," he returned. "I'm sorry that I cannot let you leave, but I care about all of them a lot more than I care whether or not the Autobots know you're alive. No offense."
"No," Ratchet said. "No, I understand. I will just have to wait."
A nod, and the white mech turned to go back to the repair bay. "None of the other rooms are all that comfortable; storage, mostly. If it's unlocked, you're welcome to pass your time inside, if you'd rather not go back to the repair bay."
"Thank you," Ratchet said. Just before the white mech disappeared from sight, he straightened up again. "I... my name is Ratchet," he said hesitantly. The other paused. "Who- what is your name?"
The white mech looked back, the plasma in the panels on his head brightening again, giving the impression of a smile. "I'm Wheeljack," he said.
o o o
Ratchet sat against the far wall of the repair bay, his useless arm cradled in his lap as he slowly rerouted energon lines and respliced neural connections. Wheeljack. He'd heard the name before; he doubted there were many on Cybertron who hadn't. A gifted engineer and a talented performer, the mech had been a highlight of the Showing nearly every vorn that Ratchet had been alive. He knew both sides had courted him fiercely in the early orns of the war, but the mech had long since fallen off of everyone's radar. To find him here, among a group of neutral refugees in their own home, was surprising.
He seemed to be the only one without a debilitating degree of injury, though the way he favored his left leg caught Ratchet's optic again and again. The engineer tended to his friends with gentle care, a lot of laughter, and near-constant music, but little medical experience. Ratchet had offered to help, his voice pitched low under the music, but Wheeljack had turned him down, thanking him but stating that the other neutrals probably wouldn't have accepted his help, anyway.
But there was something, niggling at the edge of his processor- hm. A low-level comm line, good over only a very limited distance, prodding him for attention with a short message, /Whatever help you can give me from there would be appreciated, though/ Heh.
Leaning back against the wall, his hands slowed as he brought his full scanners to bear. Information assaulted his sensors from the dozen and some mechs in the room. This one had shrapnel in his energon lines, that one has a bad case of the brittling disease, Wheeljack himself had a rend in the muscle cable of his leg that he really shouldn't be stressing. He swept his gaze across the room; x-ray, sonar, radar, infrared, a radiation frisker, each sending back minute details about each mech. Rust in a shoulder joint. A punctured solenoid. A clogged fuel pump.
He condensed the important information, added his recommendations for repairs and cures, and send the entire report at once. Across the room, Wheeljack slowed in his movements, then gave Ratchet a look over his shoulder that seemed half disbelief, half exasperation. /You don't do things half way, do you?/
/Never in my life/ Ratchet replied, smiling back faintly before turning his full attention to his arm again.
o o o
Time passed; an orn, then another. He remained very much an outsider, but the various neutrals stopped trying to bait him into arguments, and the snide comments died off. He monitored them all from a distance, giving Wheeljack updates on what the engineer couldn't see, and giving him quick in-the-field lessons on what to look for. It bothered him that Wheeljack rarely took the time to recharge; the mech spent nearly every minute bent over another, offering energon and a gentle touch and easy words of comfort. A little medical training and he'd make a perfect ward supervisor.
Late into the third orn, tremors started reaching their shelter, obviously the echoes of a battle going on right over their heads. The neutrals were sullen and fearful, and even Wheeljack's bright demeanor was tinged with worry. Ratchet alone was outwardly unaffected. He'd huddled through enough strike raids to know that fretting over it was only going to exhaust him quicker without changing a damn thing. Either they'd get hit or they wouldn't, and frying his processor over it wouldn't help. He concentrated on his arm, instead; most of the upper motor functions were in one piece again, and he was busy removing the shattered remains of his tools from his wrist.
One neutral in particular seemed unnerved by his silence. The green mech was twitchy, constantly jerking his head around every time the walls shook. When he wasn't flinching away from the ceiling, he was staring at Ratchet with his one good optic, his fingers working restlessly against each other.
A particularly bad quake rocked them, sifting silicon dust from the ceiling. Everyone paused, staring upwards in silent fear, until Ratchet broke the tension by dropping a twisted drill bit to the floor. The clank was resounding in the silence, and every head whipped around to stare at him. Ratchet met their optics briefly, blandly, then went back to work.
"You'd be used to it, wouldn't you!" the green mech shrieked, startling everyone a second time. "You can just go right on working through anything, can't you? Your friends and our friends and Megatron's friends are all up there dying and you don't even care! You don't care, you can't care, Optimus Prime sucked out your spark and you're just a drone killing in his name! You don't care! You don't care!"
Wheeljack was all of a sudden kneeling by the screaming mech, his hands firm on his shoulders. "Darkshot," he said, quietly, urgently. "Darkshot, calm down. He's not sparkless, he's just tough, he's-"
Wheeljack was cut off when Darkshot lashed out, slamming his fist into the smooth plane of the engineer's lower face. Wheeljack fell back with a cry of pain and Darkshot leapt at him, screaming. "You're with him! You're on his side! I know it, I see the looks you give him, you're going to betray us all to the Autobots and let them kill us all while you put your spark at the Prime's feet! You don't care, either!" A couple of the more able neutrals struggled off of their low berths, cautiously honing in on the screaming Darkshot. The mech shoved them all off, pummeling at Wheeljack with all of his limbs.
Alliances and acceptance be damned, Ratchet actually liked the engineer. He stood and waded into the fray, gently moving the sane neutrals to one side or the other to reach Darkshot.
After the war started, he'd been rebuilt as a field medic, with the increased strength and endurance such a build required. Though Darkshot outweighed him, he hauled the flailing mech up easily with one arm and pinned him to the berth. Hands reached out to help, grunts of pain marking when the surrounding mechs were kicked or punched, but eventually they got all of Darkshot's limbs held down. Darkshot's screaming was no longer anything remotely intelligible, simply an enraged, painful wail.
"What happened to him?" Wheeljack demanded, all of a sudden at Ratchet's elbow, his mask dented and his vocal indicators swirling in distress. "Darkshot's been gruff, but he's never been so, so-"
"I'd say a glitch," Ratchet said grimly, his hand on Darkshot's chest to hold him to the berth as he writhed. "Damage to his processor, maybe. I'd have to look to be sure." He gave Wheeljack a sideways look. "Do you trust me?"
"No," Wheeljack said flatly. "But I'm going to go along with it anyway. You'll need my help, at any rate."
"I will," Ratchet agreed, walking around the struggling mech to his head and crouching down. "Especially since I cannot put him in stasis until we find where the glitch is."
Wheeljack shuttered his optics briefly before moving to crouch beside him. "What do you want me to do?"
Just like that. All grim determination, and no argument; not from Wheeljack, not from the other neutrals. They might not trust him as a person and an Autobot, but they trusted him as a medic. Sending off a brief prayer that their trust was not misplaced, he looked around. "You all; keep him as still as you can. I don't care what it takes, as long as he doesn't go into stasis until I say so. And for the love of Primus, don't interfere. I don't care how much you think I'm hurting him, it will hurt him a lot more if you distract me at a critical moment and I punch a hole through his main processor." Wheeljack stiffened, looking about ready to protest, and Ratchet turned a hard look on him. "You'll have to be my second hand and my anchor. I'm going through his programming first. Hold his head still, and if I make any kind of noise that even remotely sounds like 'stop', I want you to disconnect me as fast as you can." Wheeljack nodded, and Ratchet felt along the side of Darkshot's neck to his ports. He slid past the cover of each one and plugged in with all of his fingers at once.
Darkshot's wailing took on a new, tortured tone, but Ratchet hardly noticed. He latched onto the stream of Darkshot's conscious thoughts, chasing the twisted data through his processor. Definitely a glitch, something shorted out in either programming or hardware that looped his thoughts into a dangerous spiral of paranoia and fear, ripping away his firewalls and the barriers between his imagination and his logic processors. Ratchet lifted out of the mutable data stream and dove into the hard programming instead, shifting through the lines of code that made up Darkshot's mind. There were gaps where there should be none, the strange termination of coded lines pointing to physical damage. Damn it. A software patch was infinitely easier than dealing with damaged circuitry.
He disconnected with a hard shudder, taking a moment to pause while his cache cleared of the remnants of Darkshot's insanity. The mech's wails took on a harsh, grating noise - vocal processor damage. They had act quickly, before Darkshot tore himself apart from the inside out.
"Physical damage," Ratchet said tersely. "Flip him over. We need to get in to his main processor."
The mechs around him looked sickened, but did as told, struggling to keep a grip on the mech as they turned him over. Darkshot found words again, cursing them all and promising vile acts of revenge on each of them. Ratchet plugged into one of his ports again, ruthlessly removing power to Darkshot's vocal processor. He tried removing power to his limbs, too, but one of those frustrating code gaps prevented the command from going through.
"Of course," Ratchet muttered, drawing a worried look from Wheeljack. "Couldn't make this too easy, after all." His hand was large enough to hold Darkshot's head still, and he directed Wheeljack in removing the plating from the back of Darkshot's skull. There was a disturbed murmur as the mech's processor was revealed, the multiple fine layers of silicon and metal exposed for probably the first time since he'd been built. And Ratchet realized that he had a big problem. All of his finer tools had been stored in the arm now hanging useless at his side. He had nothing in his good hand small enough to even get between the plates, let alone fix or circumvent whatever damage there was. "Damn it all, Wheeljack, I don't have the tools to do this."
"I do," the engineer replied. He held up his hand, and the numerous fingers split from the tip down, going from eight fingers to a few dozen in the span of as few seconds, and brief magnification brought into focus the tiny, elaborate tool at each tip. "But while I'm pretty sure I can find damage easy enough, I don't know how to go about fixing neural circuitry."
"We'll deal with that when we find it," Ratchet said. "For now, get in there and start looking. Start just behind that shattered optic and work your way out. Don't skip a single plate."
Wheeljack did as told, carefully sliding his fingers into the tiny clearance between Darkshot's processor plates. Ratchet gripped the mech's head as tight as he dared, aware that if the mech got loose and started thrashing around in earnest again with Wheeljack's fingers inside of his head, it would almost surely kill him.
It became readily apparent that Wheeljack was more than just a 'gifted engineer'. The sure, smooth way he traced the microscopic circuits without the use of his main optics spoke of a skill that only two other mechs Ratchet had ever met could exceed. He used his optics in other ways, projecting a three-dimensional hologram of the circuitry and the thin sensor he was using into the air above Darkshot's heaving back. If the hologram was to be believed, Wheeljack never touched the circuitry even once, skimming the barest distance above, following the lines through the faint magnetic field each strip of metal had.
The damage, when he found it, was obvious; a sliver of alloy from the mech's optic was driven between two plates, shorting innumerable circuits together. Wheeljack marked the area and continued to scan between each plate, looking for other damage. None was found, and he went back to the sliver. "What now?" he asked, sliding in a few other tool-fingers to hover around the metal bit. "Pull it out?"
"Wait, we need to make sure this is the problem," Ratchet ordered. He carefully maneuvered one finger to one of Darkshot's ports and jacked in, following the paths he'd taken before to one of those blank spots. "Touch it."
Darkshot's entire mind seemed to buck, and the lines of truncated code fritzed badly. Relieved to have found the source of the broken code, Ratchet found the proper protocol and forced Darkshot into stasis. He was immediately and painfully booted from the mech's thoughts, and he cursed, shaking his head to clear it. Darkshot's body relaxed, drooping to the berth, and Ratchet waved back the mechs holding him down. They didn't go far, a silent ring of hard optics watching them. Wheeljack withdrew and Ratchet set down Darkshot's head, wincing when he realized he'd left dents along the mech's jaw.
Wheeljack was watching him calmly. "You said we'd deal with my lack of medical knowledge later," the engineer said. "It's later now. How are we doing this?"
"I need to be able to see what you're doing in there," Ratchet mused. "And to guide you in building a work-around. I don't have the materials or the cleanliness factor here needed to remove the damage cards and repair them in the open."
Wheeljack was silent for a moment, then the ports on his neck slid open. "Piggyback on my neural net," he said. "You can watch second hand, and tell me what I need to do."
Ratchet frowned, but the covers on his fingertip jacks slid back anyways. "I thought you don't trust me."
"I don't. But I don't want Darkshot to die."
He'd have to live with that. He jacked into Wheeljack's ports and shuddered faintly. The engineer's mind was a whole different form of unstable than Darkshot's, though the similarities were disturbing. The lines between his imagination and logic processors were oddly blurred, and Ratchet wondered if that was what allowed him to come up with some of the more fantastic inventions he'd displayed at the Showings. A set of firewalls sprung up abruptly, herding him into a tight channel of only physical sensations, cutting him off neatly from the ebb and flow of Wheeljack's personality. He accepted the mild rebuke and seated himself fully in the second set of sensors, his optics unfocused.
Ratchet opened the comm link again, and Wheeljack went back in.
Repairing the damage took a long time, and removing the shard was only the beginning. Wheeljack followed Ratchet's instructions without complaint, absently calling out to the surrounding mechs for raw materials from the storerooms. Together, they reconstructed the broken circuit with painstaking care. Neural circuitry evolved with the mech, and the workaround had to be flexible enough to evolve the same way, or close enough that it wasn't rejected.
When the repairs were finally finished, and Darkshot's head was back in one piece, Ratchet backed out of Wheeljack's sensor array, belatedly realizing exactly how exhausted he was. Wheeljack looked little better, slumping against the medic's good shoulder with little concern for personal space. "Give him a day," Ratchet muttered. "Let the welds set before we bring him back online." Wheeljack grunted what sounded like agreement, and hesitant hands settled on them, urging them up from their crouching positions, supporting them when stiff muscle cables threatened to spill them over. Ratchet hardly noticed who was supporting him back to his berth, only that recharge had never sounded so good.
o o o
A full groon since their incarceration. Darkshot was quiet, pained by the repairs done to his processor, and embarrassed by what he'd said and done. Battle tremors passed by almost every orn. Ratchet gained limited use of his crushed hand. And Wheeljack quietly confided in him that their energon supply was running low.
He had never counted on being in the shelter for more than a few orns, and he hadn't counted on having more than one or two other mechs with him, let alone sixteen. They had enough for maybe half a groon, if they rationed it correctly.
"And then what?" Ratchet asked. They were sitting in his usual spot at the far end of the repair bay, watching the others move about with sightless optics while battle tremors rocked the room. "What happens after we run out?"
"Then I'll have to go find more," Wheeljack returned, not looking at the medic.
"Not with that bad leg, you won't," Ratchet countered. "That cable needs a full replacement. You can't transform, and the first time you start running on it will be your last. Draw even a little attention to yourself and you're slagged."
"Well, what do you want me to do?" Wheeljack hissed, actually sounding angry for the first time since Ratchet met him. Angry, and scared. "I won't let them die, Ratchet. I'd rather drain my own lines to fill theirs."
"Let me contact the Autobots," Ratchet said. "I have... some pull among the high command." He didn't mention that said pull came from being the former Counsel Liaison and current friend and advisor to the Prime, and if he had to face down Optimus himself to help the neutrals, he would. "I can get you supplies if you want to stay, or a transport out of Krasyx. Let me help, Wheeljack."
"You've helped plenty," Wheeljack said, jerking his chin at Darkshot. "He'd probably be dead without your help."
"And he'll starve without fuel," Ratchet said bluntly.
Wheeljack was silent for a long moment. Ratchet let him think, tweaking the wiring in his wrist. "All right," Wheeljack conceded. "I... all right. Lets do it now, in case it takes things a while to get settled." Ratchet nodded agreement and they stood together, crossing the repair bay.
The explosion came just after they'd rounded the corner, sending them stumbling. Someone in the room behind them was screaming. Ratchet pivoted back the way they came, Wheeljack close on his heels. Decepticons, standing at a large hole in the wall at the other end, looking around. Two very still bodies lay at their feet, and a third neutral was the screaming one, clutching at a terribly mangled leg. "Guess Lattice was right," one of the Decepticons quipped. "There was something down here, being shielded."
"Noisy somethings," the other said in disgust, giving the screaming neutral a baleful glare.
"Get out," Wheeljack said coldly, stepping forward - stepping in front of Ratchet, blocking their view of the Autobot. "We are neutrals; we are not involved in your conflict."
The first Decepticon leaned forward with a leering sneer. "Turns out, you 'neutrals' are in Decepticon territory," he drawled. "Trespassers."
"Krasyx is a neutral city," Wheeljack said.
"Not anymore," the Decepticon grinned savagely. "And Lord Megatron has very recently decreed that anyone who does not wear a Decepticon insignia is as good as an Autobot in his optics. You all have one chance to join up, right here and now.”
“Not interested,” someone called out.
The Decepticons looked around at the defiant ring of neutrals, then one raised a hand that quickly transformed into a cannon and released a short, brutal barrage at the screaming neutral.
The enraged roar of the neutrals echoed off of the room’s walls. They surged forward, Wheeljack at the fore, his talented hands transformed into wickedly curving claws. Ratchet clicked out the saws he used for removing armor plates, dodging plasma blasts to get at the Decepticons. One of the Decepticons screamed, and voices shouted from further up the tunnel they’d blasted through the ground. More Decepticons came down the tunnel, immediately attacking the neutrals.
Ratchet got behind them and wiggled up into the tunnel, his broad shoulders almost stuck in the narrow space. He felt a shiver across his processor - the barrier of Wheeljack’s shield, and he screamed out a mayday on every frequency that might possibly be monitored by Autobot audials. A Decepticon was slithering down the tunnel towards him, Pitfire optics blazing and a twisted grin on his face. Ratchet broke his oath for the first time and lashed out, catching the Decepticon across the face with his saws. The Decepticon screamed and Ratchet hit him again, energon splattering as the saws chewed the Decepticon’s face into scrap.
Leaving the corpse to block the path and hopefully delay any more Decepticons from entering, Ratchet worked his way back down to the shelter. Bodies lay everywhere, Decepticon and neutral, more of the latter. A quick survey revealed Wheeljack valiantly holding off two Decepticons alone, while the few remaining neutrals held as best they could against the rest. Injury and disease slowed them, and the Decepticons pressed them hard, herding them into a tight bundle.
Ratchet grabbed the nearest Decepticon by the shoulder, spinning him around and slamming his saws into the mech’s chest. The Decepticon’s death wail alerted the others, and one was distracted enough that Wheeljack was able to hook his claws into the mech’s optics. Another neutral fell, and two of the Decepticons turned on Ratchet. He pressed them close, forcing both to keep to physical attacks instead of shooting at him, and from the corner of his vision, he saw Wheeljack's leg crumple beneath him. He cried out a negative, trying to get past his attackers, trying to clear a space enough to at least witness Wheeljack's last moment, when a shot rang out and the mech attacking Wheeljack spun away with his arm blasted off.
More shots, more shouting. Three Autobots stood by the tunnel entrance, more hulked in the shadows behind them, and Ratchet had never been so glad to see another mech in his life.
o o o
"The Autobots," Wheeljack began suddenly, not looking up. "They- I didn't expect the members of an army to care about each other."
Ratchet took a moment to absorb those words, and to carefully chose his own. Of the sixteen neutrals in the shelter, three had survived. They were evacuated to the Autobot outpost at Dythticon; three quiet, wary refugees in their own corner of the repair bay. Ratchet stayed with them for the first orn, until the Autobot Chief Medical Officer (and his own mentor) showed up and proceeded to give him an audial full for the 'shoddy workmanship' of his arm and the loss of his fine tools and whatever else Splice decided Ratchet could be at fault for. Ratchet let the tirade wash over him like a soothing oil bath, which of course only spun up the redoubtable minibot further, and the entirety of the Dythticon medical team just sat back and watched the show.
"It is the one advantage we have over the Decepticons," he said finally. "They are encouraged to not form emotional bonds with more than a few mechs. Wide circles of friendship are seen as a wide circle of potential weaknesses. We see them as a great strength, to always have someone at our back that actually cares whether we live or die." He hesitated a moment. "Not all of us are priests. We are not a perfectly harmonious group."
Wheeljack still didn't look at him, his gaze focused at the floor beyond the end of his berth. "I watched you, there at the end," he said quietly. "You could have overpowered me at any point and left. You could have killed us all and called in the Autobots to loot our supplies. You didn't. You stayed and helped me repair everyone and you fixed poor Darkshot. Why?"
"I became a medic to help others," Ratchet said. "It doesn't matter who those others are. Autobot, Decepticon, neutral; I've repaired them all.
Wheeljack's head whipped around. "The Prime allows you to repair your enemies?" he asked sharply.
"The Prime knows better than forbid us from doing so," Ratchet replied, smiling grimly.
"Hm." Wheeljack went back to his contemplation of the floor, the plasma within his vocal indicators swirling with his thoughts. "I'd like to stay for a while," he said, after a few minutes. "I'd like to see what other strange un-war-like habits you Autobots have." Ratchet's surprise must have been transparent, because Wheeljack scowled at him. "I'm not joining," the engineer huffed. "I just want to watch, is all."
"Very well," Ratchet said mildly. "Your insignia would probably look good in the middle of your back. I can do it myself, if you'd like." Wheeljack gave him a look that was one part outrage, two parts exasperation (and maybe just a bit of a laugh, if he squinted) and for the first time since his team had been sent out to Krasyx, Ratchet truly smiled.
Fandom: Transformers
Characters/pairings: Ratchet, Wheeljack
Rating: PG-13
Summary: He'd never needed convincing to be an Autobot. Others were not so sure.
Warnings: Violence
Notes: As of now, this is by far the longest piece in this series. Neither of 'em wanted to shut up :D
Written almost totally to get into a side of Wheeljack's mind that's not the 'snarking at Ironhide' or 'making Ratchet scream his name' sectors.
Table of Contents
o o o
When Ratchet regained consciousness, it was to the sight of a patched ceiling and enough alarms in his processor to make him wonder if his arm was completely gone or merely crushed. And music.
Warily, he sat up, surveying the area. It appeared to be a makeshift repair bay, one wall lined with mechs in various stages of injury and disease. The space was small and cramped but clean, and the recharging mechs around him showed signs of inexperienced but careful treatment.
He showed the same signs. His arm was mangled but still there, and while the functionality alarms in his processor were loud and clear, the pain signals had been dialed down. His caretaker wasn't a medic, then; medics had the codes to completely shut down the pain reception node. An engineer, maybe, or perhaps just a frame modifier, judging by the nature of the welds closing off his ruptured energon lines. And clearly not a Decepticon, unless they were a VERY strange one, since he was alive and whole and not being turned over to the high command for interrogation.
Unnerved, Ratchet stood up, gingerly testing his strength. There had been an attack on a neutral city, well outside of any Autobot or Decepticon controlled territory, and he'd gone out with the rescue squad to answer the blind request for assistance. A trap had been set around the city, and the last thing Ratchet remembered was diving over a mech he didn't recognize while Seeker fire lit up everything around him. Testing his comm lines, he found them functional, but the signal bounced back to him, blocked by some kind of shield beyond the walls of the room. Frowning, he cast out, finding the shield and prodding it's defenses. Signal-tight, incredibly good programming that didn't let out a single blip.
The music grew louder, and a small white mech came around the corner, the music following him from some unobtrusive speakers set in the wall. He didn't exactly dance with the music, the way several mechs Ratchet knew did, but he did move with it, a subtle flexing of his frame to the beat. He paused when he saw Ratchet, glowing panels set into the sides of his head brightening minutely. "So that's you prodding my shields," the mech said, his tone casual and friendly. "Thought so. I didn't expect you to be up for a while yet."
"I heal quickly," Ratchet replied, too stiff compared to the friendliness the other mech was showing, but friendship could be faked. "Where am I?"
The white mech gestured around, showing off a hand with more than the usual number of fingers. "Welcome to the neutral city of Krasyx," he said wryly. "Or, what's left of it. We're in a shelter some distance beneath the lowest building foundations."
Ratchet narrowed his optics suspiciously. Neutrals didn't just rescue mechs that weren't their own, too afraid of getting labeled as sympathizers to either side of the war. "Why am I here, then?" he asked. "Taking in an injured Autobot isn't usually the smartest thing to do when the Decepticons know where you live."
There was a tension to the room now, not just from the white mech but from the others, and Ratchet got the feeling that most of the others were only pretending to still be in recharge. The white mech shrugged, somehow looking unconcerned though the lower half of his face was nearly featureless. "When I found you," he said. "You were curled around Highrush. You were protecting him, even though he wasn't an Autobot. And I know what those markings are; you're a medic. Medics don't kill."
"That distinction is becoming less practical with every passing vorn," Ratchet pointed out, his spark twisting even though he knew it to be true. The white mech flinched, and Ratchet felt like kicking himself. "I appreciate the rescue, though," he continued. "Would you be so kind as to direct me past your shields, so that I may contact my people?"
"No." Blithe to stony in a second. "The city above is still occupied. After your rescue group was taken out, the Autobots sent in a full squadron. The fighting is desperate, and I will not risk the lives of all of those here. We're staying put until the area is cleared out."
"I don't want to invite them down here," Ratchet argued. "I want to let them know I am still alive. I can leave under my own power and try to get back to the Autobots alone."
"Oh, sure," another mech spoke up, his voice laced with heavy sarcasm. "We'll just let you waltz out and hope that none of those damned soldiers up there see where you come out at. And then we can sit here and wait for you to come back with your Autobot buddies to clear us out."
Cold fury welled around Ratchet's spark. The white mech looked stricken at the other mech's words, but Ratchet ignored him. "The Autobots," he hissed. "Respect the rights of all mechs on Cybertron. The entire reason Optimus Prime is opposing Megatron is because Megatron does not see those weaker than him as creatures worth living. We wouldn't massacre a neutral group any more than we would kill off a city of Autobot sympathizers."
"Unless, of course, you heard that there might be a Decepticon in hiding among them," someone sneered softly.
Ratchet's hand clenched hard enough for the metal of his palm to protest. Tamping down the urge to turn on the derisive neutral, he quickly walked out out of the room, shouldering past the white mech as he went. The room didn't so much end as narrow into a curving hallway, branching off at various angles to other rooms. Ratchet paid the off-shoots no mind, his processor a furious whirl. How dare they! To think that Optimus Prime would condone a slaughter, to think that they would wipe an entire city off of the map because of a rumor of a Decepticon- Ratchet stopped, leaning his forehead against the silica bedrock that formed the walls, trying to regain control over the disgusted rage that swamped his processor.
"Hey."
He looked up. The white mech, looking profoundly distressed, stood just up the hallway. This close, Ratchet could see that his face may have once been not as featureless; there were old scorch marks, and welds at the edges of the smooth plate that fitted over where his mouth should have been, implying an old injury that may have blown off the bottom half of his face. The mech raised his hands, then dropped them helplessly. "Please do not hate them," he said, the glass-covered plasma on his head flickering in time with his words. "They... you know your cause, you know why you fight. We only see the propaganda and backlash."
Abruptly, Ratchet felt tired; tired of fighting, tired of the war, tired of trying to hold onto the oaths he'd taken as a medic when the entire world seemed out to push him into breaking them. "We don't massacre neutrals," he said thickly, talking more to the wall than to the white mech. "Optimus Prime would personally execute any officer who gave an order to do so."
"But we get stuck in the cross-fire just the same," the other countered quietly. "You're expecting to get fired at. You chose to get fired at. We chose to stay out, and we die anyway."
Like Krasyx. It held no affiliation with either side, and it was not any kind of a strategic benefit. Purely neutral, and now it was a battlezone. Ratchet thumped his good fist against the wall, not even denting the hard silica. "I'm sorry," he half-whispered.
A shrug, so much of the expression in his hands. "It's not yours to be sorry about," he returned. "I'm sorry that I cannot let you leave, but I care about all of them a lot more than I care whether or not the Autobots know you're alive. No offense."
"No," Ratchet said. "No, I understand. I will just have to wait."
A nod, and the white mech turned to go back to the repair bay. "None of the other rooms are all that comfortable; storage, mostly. If it's unlocked, you're welcome to pass your time inside, if you'd rather not go back to the repair bay."
"Thank you," Ratchet said. Just before the white mech disappeared from sight, he straightened up again. "I... my name is Ratchet," he said hesitantly. The other paused. "Who- what is your name?"
The white mech looked back, the plasma in the panels on his head brightening again, giving the impression of a smile. "I'm Wheeljack," he said.
o o o
Ratchet sat against the far wall of the repair bay, his useless arm cradled in his lap as he slowly rerouted energon lines and respliced neural connections. Wheeljack. He'd heard the name before; he doubted there were many on Cybertron who hadn't. A gifted engineer and a talented performer, the mech had been a highlight of the Showing nearly every vorn that Ratchet had been alive. He knew both sides had courted him fiercely in the early orns of the war, but the mech had long since fallen off of everyone's radar. To find him here, among a group of neutral refugees in their own home, was surprising.
He seemed to be the only one without a debilitating degree of injury, though the way he favored his left leg caught Ratchet's optic again and again. The engineer tended to his friends with gentle care, a lot of laughter, and near-constant music, but little medical experience. Ratchet had offered to help, his voice pitched low under the music, but Wheeljack had turned him down, thanking him but stating that the other neutrals probably wouldn't have accepted his help, anyway.
But there was something, niggling at the edge of his processor- hm. A low-level comm line, good over only a very limited distance, prodding him for attention with a short message, /Whatever help you can give me from there would be appreciated, though/ Heh.
Leaning back against the wall, his hands slowed as he brought his full scanners to bear. Information assaulted his sensors from the dozen and some mechs in the room. This one had shrapnel in his energon lines, that one has a bad case of the brittling disease, Wheeljack himself had a rend in the muscle cable of his leg that he really shouldn't be stressing. He swept his gaze across the room; x-ray, sonar, radar, infrared, a radiation frisker, each sending back minute details about each mech. Rust in a shoulder joint. A punctured solenoid. A clogged fuel pump.
He condensed the important information, added his recommendations for repairs and cures, and send the entire report at once. Across the room, Wheeljack slowed in his movements, then gave Ratchet a look over his shoulder that seemed half disbelief, half exasperation. /You don't do things half way, do you?/
/Never in my life/ Ratchet replied, smiling back faintly before turning his full attention to his arm again.
o o o
Time passed; an orn, then another. He remained very much an outsider, but the various neutrals stopped trying to bait him into arguments, and the snide comments died off. He monitored them all from a distance, giving Wheeljack updates on what the engineer couldn't see, and giving him quick in-the-field lessons on what to look for. It bothered him that Wheeljack rarely took the time to recharge; the mech spent nearly every minute bent over another, offering energon and a gentle touch and easy words of comfort. A little medical training and he'd make a perfect ward supervisor.
Late into the third orn, tremors started reaching their shelter, obviously the echoes of a battle going on right over their heads. The neutrals were sullen and fearful, and even Wheeljack's bright demeanor was tinged with worry. Ratchet alone was outwardly unaffected. He'd huddled through enough strike raids to know that fretting over it was only going to exhaust him quicker without changing a damn thing. Either they'd get hit or they wouldn't, and frying his processor over it wouldn't help. He concentrated on his arm, instead; most of the upper motor functions were in one piece again, and he was busy removing the shattered remains of his tools from his wrist.
One neutral in particular seemed unnerved by his silence. The green mech was twitchy, constantly jerking his head around every time the walls shook. When he wasn't flinching away from the ceiling, he was staring at Ratchet with his one good optic, his fingers working restlessly against each other.
A particularly bad quake rocked them, sifting silicon dust from the ceiling. Everyone paused, staring upwards in silent fear, until Ratchet broke the tension by dropping a twisted drill bit to the floor. The clank was resounding in the silence, and every head whipped around to stare at him. Ratchet met their optics briefly, blandly, then went back to work.
"You'd be used to it, wouldn't you!" the green mech shrieked, startling everyone a second time. "You can just go right on working through anything, can't you? Your friends and our friends and Megatron's friends are all up there dying and you don't even care! You don't care, you can't care, Optimus Prime sucked out your spark and you're just a drone killing in his name! You don't care! You don't care!"
Wheeljack was all of a sudden kneeling by the screaming mech, his hands firm on his shoulders. "Darkshot," he said, quietly, urgently. "Darkshot, calm down. He's not sparkless, he's just tough, he's-"
Wheeljack was cut off when Darkshot lashed out, slamming his fist into the smooth plane of the engineer's lower face. Wheeljack fell back with a cry of pain and Darkshot leapt at him, screaming. "You're with him! You're on his side! I know it, I see the looks you give him, you're going to betray us all to the Autobots and let them kill us all while you put your spark at the Prime's feet! You don't care, either!" A couple of the more able neutrals struggled off of their low berths, cautiously honing in on the screaming Darkshot. The mech shoved them all off, pummeling at Wheeljack with all of his limbs.
Alliances and acceptance be damned, Ratchet actually liked the engineer. He stood and waded into the fray, gently moving the sane neutrals to one side or the other to reach Darkshot.
After the war started, he'd been rebuilt as a field medic, with the increased strength and endurance such a build required. Though Darkshot outweighed him, he hauled the flailing mech up easily with one arm and pinned him to the berth. Hands reached out to help, grunts of pain marking when the surrounding mechs were kicked or punched, but eventually they got all of Darkshot's limbs held down. Darkshot's screaming was no longer anything remotely intelligible, simply an enraged, painful wail.
"What happened to him?" Wheeljack demanded, all of a sudden at Ratchet's elbow, his mask dented and his vocal indicators swirling in distress. "Darkshot's been gruff, but he's never been so, so-"
"I'd say a glitch," Ratchet said grimly, his hand on Darkshot's chest to hold him to the berth as he writhed. "Damage to his processor, maybe. I'd have to look to be sure." He gave Wheeljack a sideways look. "Do you trust me?"
"No," Wheeljack said flatly. "But I'm going to go along with it anyway. You'll need my help, at any rate."
"I will," Ratchet agreed, walking around the struggling mech to his head and crouching down. "Especially since I cannot put him in stasis until we find where the glitch is."
Wheeljack shuttered his optics briefly before moving to crouch beside him. "What do you want me to do?"
Just like that. All grim determination, and no argument; not from Wheeljack, not from the other neutrals. They might not trust him as a person and an Autobot, but they trusted him as a medic. Sending off a brief prayer that their trust was not misplaced, he looked around. "You all; keep him as still as you can. I don't care what it takes, as long as he doesn't go into stasis until I say so. And for the love of Primus, don't interfere. I don't care how much you think I'm hurting him, it will hurt him a lot more if you distract me at a critical moment and I punch a hole through his main processor." Wheeljack stiffened, looking about ready to protest, and Ratchet turned a hard look on him. "You'll have to be my second hand and my anchor. I'm going through his programming first. Hold his head still, and if I make any kind of noise that even remotely sounds like 'stop', I want you to disconnect me as fast as you can." Wheeljack nodded, and Ratchet felt along the side of Darkshot's neck to his ports. He slid past the cover of each one and plugged in with all of his fingers at once.
Darkshot's wailing took on a new, tortured tone, but Ratchet hardly noticed. He latched onto the stream of Darkshot's conscious thoughts, chasing the twisted data through his processor. Definitely a glitch, something shorted out in either programming or hardware that looped his thoughts into a dangerous spiral of paranoia and fear, ripping away his firewalls and the barriers between his imagination and his logic processors. Ratchet lifted out of the mutable data stream and dove into the hard programming instead, shifting through the lines of code that made up Darkshot's mind. There were gaps where there should be none, the strange termination of coded lines pointing to physical damage. Damn it. A software patch was infinitely easier than dealing with damaged circuitry.
He disconnected with a hard shudder, taking a moment to pause while his cache cleared of the remnants of Darkshot's insanity. The mech's wails took on a harsh, grating noise - vocal processor damage. They had act quickly, before Darkshot tore himself apart from the inside out.
"Physical damage," Ratchet said tersely. "Flip him over. We need to get in to his main processor."
The mechs around him looked sickened, but did as told, struggling to keep a grip on the mech as they turned him over. Darkshot found words again, cursing them all and promising vile acts of revenge on each of them. Ratchet plugged into one of his ports again, ruthlessly removing power to Darkshot's vocal processor. He tried removing power to his limbs, too, but one of those frustrating code gaps prevented the command from going through.
"Of course," Ratchet muttered, drawing a worried look from Wheeljack. "Couldn't make this too easy, after all." His hand was large enough to hold Darkshot's head still, and he directed Wheeljack in removing the plating from the back of Darkshot's skull. There was a disturbed murmur as the mech's processor was revealed, the multiple fine layers of silicon and metal exposed for probably the first time since he'd been built. And Ratchet realized that he had a big problem. All of his finer tools had been stored in the arm now hanging useless at his side. He had nothing in his good hand small enough to even get between the plates, let alone fix or circumvent whatever damage there was. "Damn it all, Wheeljack, I don't have the tools to do this."
"I do," the engineer replied. He held up his hand, and the numerous fingers split from the tip down, going from eight fingers to a few dozen in the span of as few seconds, and brief magnification brought into focus the tiny, elaborate tool at each tip. "But while I'm pretty sure I can find damage easy enough, I don't know how to go about fixing neural circuitry."
"We'll deal with that when we find it," Ratchet said. "For now, get in there and start looking. Start just behind that shattered optic and work your way out. Don't skip a single plate."
Wheeljack did as told, carefully sliding his fingers into the tiny clearance between Darkshot's processor plates. Ratchet gripped the mech's head as tight as he dared, aware that if the mech got loose and started thrashing around in earnest again with Wheeljack's fingers inside of his head, it would almost surely kill him.
It became readily apparent that Wheeljack was more than just a 'gifted engineer'. The sure, smooth way he traced the microscopic circuits without the use of his main optics spoke of a skill that only two other mechs Ratchet had ever met could exceed. He used his optics in other ways, projecting a three-dimensional hologram of the circuitry and the thin sensor he was using into the air above Darkshot's heaving back. If the hologram was to be believed, Wheeljack never touched the circuitry even once, skimming the barest distance above, following the lines through the faint magnetic field each strip of metal had.
The damage, when he found it, was obvious; a sliver of alloy from the mech's optic was driven between two plates, shorting innumerable circuits together. Wheeljack marked the area and continued to scan between each plate, looking for other damage. None was found, and he went back to the sliver. "What now?" he asked, sliding in a few other tool-fingers to hover around the metal bit. "Pull it out?"
"Wait, we need to make sure this is the problem," Ratchet ordered. He carefully maneuvered one finger to one of Darkshot's ports and jacked in, following the paths he'd taken before to one of those blank spots. "Touch it."
Darkshot's entire mind seemed to buck, and the lines of truncated code fritzed badly. Relieved to have found the source of the broken code, Ratchet found the proper protocol and forced Darkshot into stasis. He was immediately and painfully booted from the mech's thoughts, and he cursed, shaking his head to clear it. Darkshot's body relaxed, drooping to the berth, and Ratchet waved back the mechs holding him down. They didn't go far, a silent ring of hard optics watching them. Wheeljack withdrew and Ratchet set down Darkshot's head, wincing when he realized he'd left dents along the mech's jaw.
Wheeljack was watching him calmly. "You said we'd deal with my lack of medical knowledge later," the engineer said. "It's later now. How are we doing this?"
"I need to be able to see what you're doing in there," Ratchet mused. "And to guide you in building a work-around. I don't have the materials or the cleanliness factor here needed to remove the damage cards and repair them in the open."
Wheeljack was silent for a moment, then the ports on his neck slid open. "Piggyback on my neural net," he said. "You can watch second hand, and tell me what I need to do."
Ratchet frowned, but the covers on his fingertip jacks slid back anyways. "I thought you don't trust me."
"I don't. But I don't want Darkshot to die."
He'd have to live with that. He jacked into Wheeljack's ports and shuddered faintly. The engineer's mind was a whole different form of unstable than Darkshot's, though the similarities were disturbing. The lines between his imagination and logic processors were oddly blurred, and Ratchet wondered if that was what allowed him to come up with some of the more fantastic inventions he'd displayed at the Showings. A set of firewalls sprung up abruptly, herding him into a tight channel of only physical sensations, cutting him off neatly from the ebb and flow of Wheeljack's personality. He accepted the mild rebuke and seated himself fully in the second set of sensors, his optics unfocused.
Ratchet opened the comm link again, and Wheeljack went back in.
Repairing the damage took a long time, and removing the shard was only the beginning. Wheeljack followed Ratchet's instructions without complaint, absently calling out to the surrounding mechs for raw materials from the storerooms. Together, they reconstructed the broken circuit with painstaking care. Neural circuitry evolved with the mech, and the workaround had to be flexible enough to evolve the same way, or close enough that it wasn't rejected.
When the repairs were finally finished, and Darkshot's head was back in one piece, Ratchet backed out of Wheeljack's sensor array, belatedly realizing exactly how exhausted he was. Wheeljack looked little better, slumping against the medic's good shoulder with little concern for personal space. "Give him a day," Ratchet muttered. "Let the welds set before we bring him back online." Wheeljack grunted what sounded like agreement, and hesitant hands settled on them, urging them up from their crouching positions, supporting them when stiff muscle cables threatened to spill them over. Ratchet hardly noticed who was supporting him back to his berth, only that recharge had never sounded so good.
o o o
A full groon since their incarceration. Darkshot was quiet, pained by the repairs done to his processor, and embarrassed by what he'd said and done. Battle tremors passed by almost every orn. Ratchet gained limited use of his crushed hand. And Wheeljack quietly confided in him that their energon supply was running low.
He had never counted on being in the shelter for more than a few orns, and he hadn't counted on having more than one or two other mechs with him, let alone sixteen. They had enough for maybe half a groon, if they rationed it correctly.
"And then what?" Ratchet asked. They were sitting in his usual spot at the far end of the repair bay, watching the others move about with sightless optics while battle tremors rocked the room. "What happens after we run out?"
"Then I'll have to go find more," Wheeljack returned, not looking at the medic.
"Not with that bad leg, you won't," Ratchet countered. "That cable needs a full replacement. You can't transform, and the first time you start running on it will be your last. Draw even a little attention to yourself and you're slagged."
"Well, what do you want me to do?" Wheeljack hissed, actually sounding angry for the first time since Ratchet met him. Angry, and scared. "I won't let them die, Ratchet. I'd rather drain my own lines to fill theirs."
"Let me contact the Autobots," Ratchet said. "I have... some pull among the high command." He didn't mention that said pull came from being the former Counsel Liaison and current friend and advisor to the Prime, and if he had to face down Optimus himself to help the neutrals, he would. "I can get you supplies if you want to stay, or a transport out of Krasyx. Let me help, Wheeljack."
"You've helped plenty," Wheeljack said, jerking his chin at Darkshot. "He'd probably be dead without your help."
"And he'll starve without fuel," Ratchet said bluntly.
Wheeljack was silent for a long moment. Ratchet let him think, tweaking the wiring in his wrist. "All right," Wheeljack conceded. "I... all right. Lets do it now, in case it takes things a while to get settled." Ratchet nodded agreement and they stood together, crossing the repair bay.
The explosion came just after they'd rounded the corner, sending them stumbling. Someone in the room behind them was screaming. Ratchet pivoted back the way they came, Wheeljack close on his heels. Decepticons, standing at a large hole in the wall at the other end, looking around. Two very still bodies lay at their feet, and a third neutral was the screaming one, clutching at a terribly mangled leg. "Guess Lattice was right," one of the Decepticons quipped. "There was something down here, being shielded."
"Noisy somethings," the other said in disgust, giving the screaming neutral a baleful glare.
"Get out," Wheeljack said coldly, stepping forward - stepping in front of Ratchet, blocking their view of the Autobot. "We are neutrals; we are not involved in your conflict."
The first Decepticon leaned forward with a leering sneer. "Turns out, you 'neutrals' are in Decepticon territory," he drawled. "Trespassers."
"Krasyx is a neutral city," Wheeljack said.
"Not anymore," the Decepticon grinned savagely. "And Lord Megatron has very recently decreed that anyone who does not wear a Decepticon insignia is as good as an Autobot in his optics. You all have one chance to join up, right here and now.”
“Not interested,” someone called out.
The Decepticons looked around at the defiant ring of neutrals, then one raised a hand that quickly transformed into a cannon and released a short, brutal barrage at the screaming neutral.
The enraged roar of the neutrals echoed off of the room’s walls. They surged forward, Wheeljack at the fore, his talented hands transformed into wickedly curving claws. Ratchet clicked out the saws he used for removing armor plates, dodging plasma blasts to get at the Decepticons. One of the Decepticons screamed, and voices shouted from further up the tunnel they’d blasted through the ground. More Decepticons came down the tunnel, immediately attacking the neutrals.
Ratchet got behind them and wiggled up into the tunnel, his broad shoulders almost stuck in the narrow space. He felt a shiver across his processor - the barrier of Wheeljack’s shield, and he screamed out a mayday on every frequency that might possibly be monitored by Autobot audials. A Decepticon was slithering down the tunnel towards him, Pitfire optics blazing and a twisted grin on his face. Ratchet broke his oath for the first time and lashed out, catching the Decepticon across the face with his saws. The Decepticon screamed and Ratchet hit him again, energon splattering as the saws chewed the Decepticon’s face into scrap.
Leaving the corpse to block the path and hopefully delay any more Decepticons from entering, Ratchet worked his way back down to the shelter. Bodies lay everywhere, Decepticon and neutral, more of the latter. A quick survey revealed Wheeljack valiantly holding off two Decepticons alone, while the few remaining neutrals held as best they could against the rest. Injury and disease slowed them, and the Decepticons pressed them hard, herding them into a tight bundle.
Ratchet grabbed the nearest Decepticon by the shoulder, spinning him around and slamming his saws into the mech’s chest. The Decepticon’s death wail alerted the others, and one was distracted enough that Wheeljack was able to hook his claws into the mech’s optics. Another neutral fell, and two of the Decepticons turned on Ratchet. He pressed them close, forcing both to keep to physical attacks instead of shooting at him, and from the corner of his vision, he saw Wheeljack's leg crumple beneath him. He cried out a negative, trying to get past his attackers, trying to clear a space enough to at least witness Wheeljack's last moment, when a shot rang out and the mech attacking Wheeljack spun away with his arm blasted off.
More shots, more shouting. Three Autobots stood by the tunnel entrance, more hulked in the shadows behind them, and Ratchet had never been so glad to see another mech in his life.
o o o
"The Autobots," Wheeljack began suddenly, not looking up. "They- I didn't expect the members of an army to care about each other."
Ratchet took a moment to absorb those words, and to carefully chose his own. Of the sixteen neutrals in the shelter, three had survived. They were evacuated to the Autobot outpost at Dythticon; three quiet, wary refugees in their own corner of the repair bay. Ratchet stayed with them for the first orn, until the Autobot Chief Medical Officer (and his own mentor) showed up and proceeded to give him an audial full for the 'shoddy workmanship' of his arm and the loss of his fine tools and whatever else Splice decided Ratchet could be at fault for. Ratchet let the tirade wash over him like a soothing oil bath, which of course only spun up the redoubtable minibot further, and the entirety of the Dythticon medical team just sat back and watched the show.
"It is the one advantage we have over the Decepticons," he said finally. "They are encouraged to not form emotional bonds with more than a few mechs. Wide circles of friendship are seen as a wide circle of potential weaknesses. We see them as a great strength, to always have someone at our back that actually cares whether we live or die." He hesitated a moment. "Not all of us are priests. We are not a perfectly harmonious group."
Wheeljack still didn't look at him, his gaze focused at the floor beyond the end of his berth. "I watched you, there at the end," he said quietly. "You could have overpowered me at any point and left. You could have killed us all and called in the Autobots to loot our supplies. You didn't. You stayed and helped me repair everyone and you fixed poor Darkshot. Why?"
"I became a medic to help others," Ratchet said. "It doesn't matter who those others are. Autobot, Decepticon, neutral; I've repaired them all.
Wheeljack's head whipped around. "The Prime allows you to repair your enemies?" he asked sharply.
"The Prime knows better than forbid us from doing so," Ratchet replied, smiling grimly.
"Hm." Wheeljack went back to his contemplation of the floor, the plasma within his vocal indicators swirling with his thoughts. "I'd like to stay for a while," he said, after a few minutes. "I'd like to see what other strange un-war-like habits you Autobots have." Ratchet's surprise must have been transparent, because Wheeljack scowled at him. "I'm not joining," the engineer huffed. "I just want to watch, is all."
"Very well," Ratchet said mildly. "Your insignia would probably look good in the middle of your back. I can do it myself, if you'd like." Wheeljack gave him a look that was one part outrage, two parts exasperation (and maybe just a bit of a laugh, if he squinted) and for the first time since his team had been sent out to Krasyx, Ratchet truly smiled.