Whispers of the Restless Part 1
This story is done for the TF_Bunny_Farm contest. The bunny was made by Kirin_Saga, although I do not know which post it came from. This was beta'd by Enzan_lover. Thank you, Enzan! :D
Title: Whispers of the Restless
Rating: T borderline M for safety.
Pairings: Ratchet/Wheeljack/Perceptor
Summary: No one saw it coming. He committed suicide, but no one knew why. But then weird things start happening, and a psychic may be their only hope to fix it...
No one saw it.
Least of all, his bonded.
He had been seeming a little unwell lately, yes. His bonded always tried to ask him what was wrong, tried to coax his troubles out sweetly as bonded always could do.
But not this time. His troubles stayed locked firmly away. Further away than his bonded could find, even through the spark bond that was said to be able to join everything.
But no one thought that this was what would happen.
The heartbroken wail of his bonded rocked the Ark back and forth in the middle of the night. It was only moments before his bonded jumped out of bed and ran to where they sensed him last.
There he was. Mutilated and broken on the ground of the place he frequented so often. The scalpel used for his death was in his hand, and his optics were black and unresponsive.
---
“I understand if you do not wish to go back to the lab, Wheeljack. But I can’t understand the reason you’re giving me…” Optimus said quietly.
The engineer trembled, his optics dim, and hugged himself, looking at the ground. It twisted Optimus’ spark to see the previously happy and upbeat Wheeljack become a shadow of his former self, but all he could do was hope that after he mourned he could perhaps move on.
“I still see his energon all over the room. I can still smell it. I can still feel it.” He shuddered. “And… and sometimes, when it’s dark like… like that night… I still see his body sprawled there with that Primus-damned scalpel. He’s… he’s looking at me, Prime. He’s angry with me. He’s angry with us…”
“Wheeljack,” Optimus said softly, “his body was removed and the lab was scoured clean. Perhaps your CPU keeps replaying the image because you’re upset…”
“It’s too real!” Wheeljack wailed. “And you know when Prowl was there inspecting my last invention?”
“I was told that something exploded,” Optimus said quietly.
“That’s an understatement! The lab practically took a life of its own!” the engineer shouted, his optics hysterical and his blinkers flashing an upset blue-green. “Beakers went flying, everything mechanical practically turned into little bombs, the doors fritzed and closed and locked behind us… and… and the scalpels…” he shuddered. “Ratchet keeps a box of scalpels in there in case anyone using the lab needs to cut through Cybertronian-grade metal. They all flew out of their box on the table and started cutting through both of us. Something was shrieking. Something was shrieking.”
“Wheeljack, I understand that you are upset, but calm down. Prowl reported that there was a system malfunction with a few inventions at the same time. Apparently, one of those things was a magnetism inducer. That was what made the scalpels fly. And its magnetism caused the other machines to malfunction. The door malfunctioned on its own; it hasn’t had a maintenance check in a long time. The beakers have small traces of metal inside of the glass to keep them from being crushed. They just responded to magnetism.” Optimus shook his head. “The shrieking… Wheeljack, you must understand, you’ve been through a lot. We all have.”
“I hear him humming in there sometimes,” Wheeljack murmured, almost as if he hadn’t heard the commander. “He used to hum a lot, did you know? It always sounded nice… but now… now it sounds wrong. It sounds blacker, more evil. He’s angry.”
“Wheeljack, I know that this is hard, but Perceptor is dead,” Prowl said gently. Both the engineer and commander looked up sharply. Neither had noticed Prowl coming through the door. By the looks of the data-pad in his hand, he had just come in to drop off more reports. “He committed suicide last month. And there are no such things as ghosts.”
“Say that when you see him just staring at you, as if it’s your fault that he’s dead. As if it’s your fault that he… that he…” Wheeljack let out a quiet wail and buried his face in his hands. “I’m sorry, Percy! Me an’ Ratchet would’ve worked harder to figure out what was wrong if we knew how upset you were! We would’ve! Please…”
Prowl frowned, an uncharacteristic amount of sympathy in his optics. “Wheeljack, why don’t you go to the med bay? I think you need Ratchet right now.”
Wheeljack just let out a heartbroken mechanical cry, and Prowl’s optics flickered a little. The tactician touched the engineer’s shoulder briefly, putting pressure on it lightly, comfortingly. Wheeljack let out a strangled sound, then sharply turned around and left the office, presumably to seek comfort from his remaining bonded.
Prowl and Optimus looked after him, Optimus looking extremely tired and Prowl with his doorwings drooping slightly.
“Why did you wish to see me, Prowl?”
The tactician looked up, forcing his wings to stand up higher and putting the data-pad down on the desk. “I wanted to say that Wildfire’s inspection is well under way. He does, however, find it unprofessional that we’re hiring a psychic.”
Optimus knew that Prowl agreed with Wildfire, but he also knew that Prowl understood why the Autobots were hiring a psychic. And Optimus would even venture to say that Prowl thought that, though it was unprofessional, it was the wisest course of action. Neither of them thought that a human psychic would do any physical good-there was no such thing as ghosts and the psychic was probably just a fraud anyway-but it would help some of the Autobots psychologically.
It was the first time anyone saw Beachcomber as anything but his laid back self.
The scream tore through the halls, sending everyone into immediate alert. The last time a scream woke them up, it was because one of their own was dead.
But no. Everyone bolted to the source of the scream to see Beachcomber outside of his room, huddled in a little ball on the floor, struggling to take a proper breath.
To everyone’s surprise, it was Ratchet and Wheeljack who came forward and knelt by the minibot, taking his trembling form into their arms. Maybe it was because all three of them had been close to Perceptor. Maybe the medic and engineer just felt bad for him. Either way, Beachcomber clung to their armor desperately and Ratchet stroked the geologist’s back soothingly and made quiet shushing sounds.
“Okay… come on… tell us what happened.”
Beachcomber was still shaking as he glanced up at his dead friend’s old bonded, his optics wide behind his visor. “He was above me. There was energon everywhere, all over the room and all over him. He looked just like how his body did. He was bleeding, man. He was bleeding everywhere. He was angry. He had a scalpel.” He buried his head into Ratchet’s armor and Wheeljack tightened his grip around the medic and geologist. “He’s angry. Really angry. He’s not Percy anymore. I thought he was going to kill me. Kill us all, one by one.”
Red Alert, watching from the side, made a strangled squeak and leaned against the wall, his horns sparking uncontrollably. Inferno rested a hand on his shoulder, understanding how his friend’s glitch could work into overdrive at the thought of this.
Ratchet just patted the geologist gently, ignoring the onlookers for the time-being. “Come on. You can sleep in the med bay tonight.” He picked up the minibot easily in his arms, Beachcomber not letting out so much as a squeak of protest. The medic looked up and glared at the people surrounding the scene, his expression threatening. “Now you all go back to your berths. Nothing to see here.”
With that, the medic and the engineer both went back through the dark hallways with the geologist, disappearing into the black.
Optimus winced inwardly at the memory. That was the only time he had ever seen Beachcomber afraid. There had been other incidents, like when Bluestreak woke up screaming from a nightmare involving Perceptor (though he absolutely refused to elaborate the events of the nightmare further than that), when Brawn randomly started smashing the lab when he was alone there (he had later said that he had seen Perceptor there, all of his wounds in place, and the scientist had been bleeding everywhere. He had said that he was angry that the scientist committed suicide, so he was trying to hit Perceptor. He just could never touch the scientist.), and the time the twins fell into the Ark’s deep set machinery and nearly died…
“What on Cybertron possessed you to try to jump through the Ark’s engine room?” Ratchet sighed, examining the twins’ wounds. The two Autobot warriors had been lucky that they hadn’t been deactivated.
Wheeljack just shook his head slowly, doorwings drooping and his expression subdued. Ratchet had stopped shouting and raging like he used to before. Now, sometimes there was some half-hearted throwing of tools, some swears, and some scolding, but it lacked the heart it used to have.
“He wouldn’t stop. We had to catch him.”
“Who, Sideswipe? Is there someone else down there we have to find?” Ratchet asked, looking up with a serious light to his optics.
“I think that he left the engine room. I never knew that Percy ran so fast.”
Both Ratchet and Wheeljack stiffened. “Excuse me…?”
“We asked him to stop,” Sideswipe said, looking up with a disturbing smile on his face. “We wanted him to get those wounds checked. They were splashing energon everywhere. And his optics were very red. Sorta like a Decepticon’s. I don’t think he heard us, though. He just kept running through the halls, so we tried to chase him. We never really caught him, though.”
He looked down, his smile still in place. “I bet we could catch him later. All that energon was enough to make the floor slippery and nearly made a stream in the Ark where he walked. He can’t run so fast forever. But… maybe we’re not the ones supposed to catch him. His scalpel looked really bloody, though.”
The medical tray in Wheeljack’s hands clattered to the floor.
“Wildfire is reluctant to keep this off the records,” Prowl said quietly, looking out the window slowly. “Everyone’s skittish behavior is already aggravating him.”
Wildfire was a high-ranking official on Cybertron, and though he was not known for mercy or the like, he did his job effectively. His division was in charge of collecting information on the Decepticons and making spare parts for medical teams to use on Autobots whose limbs were destroyed. How those two functions crossed over and got caught in the same group, no one was quite sure, but the division did both well.
Of course, when he noticed how many spare parts were going to the Ark, he decided to go down there for an inspection. A team had gone up to Cybertron and visited him two months beforehand; if he had only asked them, he could have saved himself a lot of trouble. But he had decided that a surprise inspection would be best.
Anyone could have told him that most of the spare parts went to Wheeljack and the twins.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out that he was impatient with everyone grieving. He wasn’t a very sympathetic character, though Optimus had managed to convince him that they had to be cut a little slack with current events.
Prowl looked back at the window, his wings twitching. “The psychic is here. I came to tell you that as well. Her name is Ember Fox, and her assistant is named Jason Furman. Apparently, Ember is the one who sees the clearest and Jason draws a picture of what he senses. They’ll probably come in, say that there’s a ghost, ‘exorcise’ it, then go.”
“It doesn’t matter to me what resources it takes or what they say, as long as it gives our men some peace of mind,” Optimus sighed, standing up slowly.
“I suppose that is all that matters,” Prowl agreed.
Optimus and Prowl left side-by-side, the former straightening his posture and the latter stiffening his doorwings. By the time they had come to the entrance of the Ark, they both had redressed in their ‘unaffected military official’ uniform.
Beachcomber was talking softly to the two humans when the tactician and commander found them. Red Alert was huddled in the corner, his glitch refusing to let him leave, but his fear of the whole matter threatening to crash him anyway.
There was a female and a male human. The female had red-blond hair that curled a little, falling to the small of her back. Her eyes were a golden color, something everyone assumed to be caused by contact lenses. She was tall and composed, but her fingers twitched nervously every so often. And it didn’t look like the twitching was caused by the presence of the comparatively huge Autobots.
The male, presumably Jason, was smaller, wirier, and had mousy brown hair. His fingers were stained with what looked like a combination of black paint, dye, and charcoal and his dark eyes glanced back and forth jumpily, as though he were expecting the shadows to come out and swallow him up in a moment’s notice. He had a little satchel, probably filled with drawing and art supplies, wrapped loosely around his hip, constantly threatening to fall off completely but seeming to never carry through. He had a blank canvas held under his arm, shifting it a little every once in a while and pulling up his satchel.
“Hi, I’m Ember, and this is Jason,” the woman said, coming forward with her hand outstretched. “We were called about a spirit?”
“A possible one,” Optimus corrected gently, kneeling down and taking the hand between his thumb and forefinger carefully, shaking it slightly. “Some of my men believe that this place is haunted.”
He didn’t offer any more information to possibly be leaked to the human media, but neither Ember nor Jason seemed to mind. “Alright! Just take us to the place of most disturbance and we’ll tell you whether or not there’s a spook out for mischief.”
Optimus straightened, and for a moment, he wasn’t sure where they should go. The engine room? Beachcomber’s room? Around the Ark in general?
“The lab.”
Beachcomber spoke softly, be he was loud enough to be heard. “Have you, like, seen Ratchet and Wheeljack lately? The lab. Definitely.”
“Okay then! Lead the way,” Ember said cheerily, clapping her hands together.
“It’s just down here,” Optimus said, holding out an arm and walking through the one place Perceptor had spent most of his time in in life, and the place he took his own. Prowl followed because he felt that it would be proper for him to be there. Red Alert and Beachcomber followed for reasons of their own.
The door to the lab swished open and the heads of Ratchet and Wheeljack looked up sharply. They didn’t say anything. Ratchet just frowned and Wheeljack looked worried. The medic had been against bringing a ‘psychic’ into the matter, but at this point, the engineer was willing to believe anything.
They shuffled to the side, abandoning their current yet half-hearted project, and Optimus let the group inside.
Ember nodded to him, smiling as she walked into the room jauntily. “Thanks for that. I have no clue how you can remember your way through those halls; I’d be totally lo-”
She stopped as she turned her gaze to the room, her smile falling away and her pupils dilating. There was a clatter, and the Cybertronians looked to see that Jason had dropped his canvas.
“It’s so… so… bloody in here. It’s everywhere,” she whispered, scanning the room. She froze and all color still within her drained from her face. She let out an ear-shattering scream and fell to the ground, completely out cold.
Jason snatched his canvas up and spun around. “Grab her and run!” was all he said before he sprinted out.
Most of the Autobots were certain that this was an act, but they played along. Prowl gently picked up the fallen woman and they all filed out swiftly, Ratchet and Wheeljack tagging along.
They found Jason in the med bay, somehow having managed to get on one of the berths, and he was painting furiously on his canvas. His hands were enormously steady despite the fear his paleness and abrupt departure spoke of, and he was muttering to himself softly. “Didn’t think… Didn’t think that alien spirits became ghosts…”
Ratchet frowned, taking Ember from Prowl and rifling through one of his drawers. He took out a tiny human-sized tablet, and with remarkable dexterity he brought it just below the woman’s nose and broke it.
Ember snapped awake, coughing and shaking her head. “Ouch. Ow. They’ve… they’ve never done that before…”
“Done what?” Ratchet asked, an undertone of anger in his voice. If this human femme was going to take advantage of his bonded’s death for personal gain, he couldn’t promise that he wouldn’t throw her across the room.
“You didn’t tell us everything, did you?” Jason muttered, still painting without pause.
Ember clambered into a sitting position and looking up with a… glare on her face? “You have one seriously pissed off ghost. Possibly the most pissed off one I’ve ever met. Ghosts like that DO NOT haunt a place. They haunt people. You KNEW him,” she accused, a furious red coming to her face.
Ratchet stiffened along with everyone else. How did she know? They had made sure that nothing of Perceptor’s suicide got out into the media, so she couldn’t have researched it beforehand by conventional means…
“He… he… he d-died last month.” Wheeljack made a sound like he was swallowing, and it took him a moment to force the next thing from his vocalizer. “He committed suicide.”
“That’s not possible,” Jason said, still concentrating on the painting. “Suicide ghosts only hang around because of regret, the remembrance of something they forgot to do in life, or to watch what happens in the wake of their death. They’re sad. Not angry. Suicide ghosts don’t get violent unless they’re mentally ill.”
“Well what else could it have been?” Ratchet asked darkly, putting Ember onto the berth with Jason and turning away. “All the evidence pointed towards it. He’d been upset for a month before. We tried talking to him, but he wouldn’t say what was the matter. Then we find him on the lab floor dead with a bloody scalpel in his hand.” He wrapped his arms around himself, his optics glazing for a moment. “We should’ve tried harder to talk to him.”
Ember was silent for a long moment. “You both.” She pointed to Ratchet and Wheeljack slowly. “You were close to him. I’d guess either lovers or brothers. I can sense him around you, but it’s not entirely an angry energy like in the lab.”
“We were his bonded, actually,” Wheeljack said quietly, looking at the floor.
“It’s the rough equivalent of marriage in your culture, only it is the linking of minds and souls instead of the exchange of vows and rings,” Ratchet said.
“How do you know all this?” Red Alert asked the humans, his horns sparking lightly.
Ember looked up at him, a scowl in place. “Look, I know that most of you hired us expecting a bunch of frauds out for a little money. You probably expected us to walk around with a cross or something, then after a bit say that you’re spirit-free. But no. I have never seen a spirit like that.”
“Look at me! I only saw him for a moment and I can paint him exactly as I saw him! He was just so vivid…” Jason stuck the handle of his brush in between his teeth and twirled around the painting. “Is that your bonded?”
Ratchet and Wheeljack only needed to glance at it briefly. Wheeljack let out a small wail and spun around, hiding his face. “I told you! I TOLD you! He’s angry. He’s so angry. Oh Percy, we would’ve tried harder! I swear! We never thought… we never thought that you…”
Ratchet kept staring at the picture, his lips drawn in a tight frown.
“That’s exactly how he looked in my room,” Beachcomber said softly.
It was Perceptor, but at the same time not. His soft smile wasn’t there, but instead there was a furious snarl on his face. He was in a crouching position, as if he were about to pounce on the person looking at him. His optics were red, and every wound that had been there when he died was fresh and bleeding energon freely, splashing it across the floor.
“He’s not angry at you for not stopping him or figuring out what was wrong. He didn’t commit suicide, and he’s angry that you think so and those who know otherwise are keeping their mouths shut. That spirit is not a suicide. That spirit was murdered,” Ember said darkly.
Title: Whispers of the Restless
Rating: T borderline M for safety.
Pairings: Ratchet/Wheeljack/Perceptor
Summary: No one saw it coming. He committed suicide, but no one knew why. But then weird things start happening, and a psychic may be their only hope to fix it...
No one saw it.
Least of all, his bonded.
He had been seeming a little unwell lately, yes. His bonded always tried to ask him what was wrong, tried to coax his troubles out sweetly as bonded always could do.
But not this time. His troubles stayed locked firmly away. Further away than his bonded could find, even through the spark bond that was said to be able to join everything.
But no one thought that this was what would happen.
The heartbroken wail of his bonded rocked the Ark back and forth in the middle of the night. It was only moments before his bonded jumped out of bed and ran to where they sensed him last.
There he was. Mutilated and broken on the ground of the place he frequented so often. The scalpel used for his death was in his hand, and his optics were black and unresponsive.
---
“I understand if you do not wish to go back to the lab, Wheeljack. But I can’t understand the reason you’re giving me…” Optimus said quietly.
The engineer trembled, his optics dim, and hugged himself, looking at the ground. It twisted Optimus’ spark to see the previously happy and upbeat Wheeljack become a shadow of his former self, but all he could do was hope that after he mourned he could perhaps move on.
“I still see his energon all over the room. I can still smell it. I can still feel it.” He shuddered. “And… and sometimes, when it’s dark like… like that night… I still see his body sprawled there with that Primus-damned scalpel. He’s… he’s looking at me, Prime. He’s angry with me. He’s angry with us…”
“Wheeljack,” Optimus said softly, “his body was removed and the lab was scoured clean. Perhaps your CPU keeps replaying the image because you’re upset…”
“It’s too real!” Wheeljack wailed. “And you know when Prowl was there inspecting my last invention?”
“I was told that something exploded,” Optimus said quietly.
“That’s an understatement! The lab practically took a life of its own!” the engineer shouted, his optics hysterical and his blinkers flashing an upset blue-green. “Beakers went flying, everything mechanical practically turned into little bombs, the doors fritzed and closed and locked behind us… and… and the scalpels…” he shuddered. “Ratchet keeps a box of scalpels in there in case anyone using the lab needs to cut through Cybertronian-grade metal. They all flew out of their box on the table and started cutting through both of us. Something was shrieking. Something was shrieking.”
“Wheeljack, I understand that you are upset, but calm down. Prowl reported that there was a system malfunction with a few inventions at the same time. Apparently, one of those things was a magnetism inducer. That was what made the scalpels fly. And its magnetism caused the other machines to malfunction. The door malfunctioned on its own; it hasn’t had a maintenance check in a long time. The beakers have small traces of metal inside of the glass to keep them from being crushed. They just responded to magnetism.” Optimus shook his head. “The shrieking… Wheeljack, you must understand, you’ve been through a lot. We all have.”
“I hear him humming in there sometimes,” Wheeljack murmured, almost as if he hadn’t heard the commander. “He used to hum a lot, did you know? It always sounded nice… but now… now it sounds wrong. It sounds blacker, more evil. He’s angry.”
“Wheeljack, I know that this is hard, but Perceptor is dead,” Prowl said gently. Both the engineer and commander looked up sharply. Neither had noticed Prowl coming through the door. By the looks of the data-pad in his hand, he had just come in to drop off more reports. “He committed suicide last month. And there are no such things as ghosts.”
“Say that when you see him just staring at you, as if it’s your fault that he’s dead. As if it’s your fault that he… that he…” Wheeljack let out a quiet wail and buried his face in his hands. “I’m sorry, Percy! Me an’ Ratchet would’ve worked harder to figure out what was wrong if we knew how upset you were! We would’ve! Please…”
Prowl frowned, an uncharacteristic amount of sympathy in his optics. “Wheeljack, why don’t you go to the med bay? I think you need Ratchet right now.”
Wheeljack just let out a heartbroken mechanical cry, and Prowl’s optics flickered a little. The tactician touched the engineer’s shoulder briefly, putting pressure on it lightly, comfortingly. Wheeljack let out a strangled sound, then sharply turned around and left the office, presumably to seek comfort from his remaining bonded.
Prowl and Optimus looked after him, Optimus looking extremely tired and Prowl with his doorwings drooping slightly.
“Why did you wish to see me, Prowl?”
The tactician looked up, forcing his wings to stand up higher and putting the data-pad down on the desk. “I wanted to say that Wildfire’s inspection is well under way. He does, however, find it unprofessional that we’re hiring a psychic.”
Optimus knew that Prowl agreed with Wildfire, but he also knew that Prowl understood why the Autobots were hiring a psychic. And Optimus would even venture to say that Prowl thought that, though it was unprofessional, it was the wisest course of action. Neither of them thought that a human psychic would do any physical good-there was no such thing as ghosts and the psychic was probably just a fraud anyway-but it would help some of the Autobots psychologically.
It was the first time anyone saw Beachcomber as anything but his laid back self.
The scream tore through the halls, sending everyone into immediate alert. The last time a scream woke them up, it was because one of their own was dead.
But no. Everyone bolted to the source of the scream to see Beachcomber outside of his room, huddled in a little ball on the floor, struggling to take a proper breath.
To everyone’s surprise, it was Ratchet and Wheeljack who came forward and knelt by the minibot, taking his trembling form into their arms. Maybe it was because all three of them had been close to Perceptor. Maybe the medic and engineer just felt bad for him. Either way, Beachcomber clung to their armor desperately and Ratchet stroked the geologist’s back soothingly and made quiet shushing sounds.
“Okay… come on… tell us what happened.”
Beachcomber was still shaking as he glanced up at his dead friend’s old bonded, his optics wide behind his visor. “He was above me. There was energon everywhere, all over the room and all over him. He looked just like how his body did. He was bleeding, man. He was bleeding everywhere. He was angry. He had a scalpel.” He buried his head into Ratchet’s armor and Wheeljack tightened his grip around the medic and geologist. “He’s angry. Really angry. He’s not Percy anymore. I thought he was going to kill me. Kill us all, one by one.”
Red Alert, watching from the side, made a strangled squeak and leaned against the wall, his horns sparking uncontrollably. Inferno rested a hand on his shoulder, understanding how his friend’s glitch could work into overdrive at the thought of this.
Ratchet just patted the geologist gently, ignoring the onlookers for the time-being. “Come on. You can sleep in the med bay tonight.” He picked up the minibot easily in his arms, Beachcomber not letting out so much as a squeak of protest. The medic looked up and glared at the people surrounding the scene, his expression threatening. “Now you all go back to your berths. Nothing to see here.”
With that, the medic and the engineer both went back through the dark hallways with the geologist, disappearing into the black.
Optimus winced inwardly at the memory. That was the only time he had ever seen Beachcomber afraid. There had been other incidents, like when Bluestreak woke up screaming from a nightmare involving Perceptor (though he absolutely refused to elaborate the events of the nightmare further than that), when Brawn randomly started smashing the lab when he was alone there (he had later said that he had seen Perceptor there, all of his wounds in place, and the scientist had been bleeding everywhere. He had said that he was angry that the scientist committed suicide, so he was trying to hit Perceptor. He just could never touch the scientist.), and the time the twins fell into the Ark’s deep set machinery and nearly died…
“What on Cybertron possessed you to try to jump through the Ark’s engine room?” Ratchet sighed, examining the twins’ wounds. The two Autobot warriors had been lucky that they hadn’t been deactivated.
Wheeljack just shook his head slowly, doorwings drooping and his expression subdued. Ratchet had stopped shouting and raging like he used to before. Now, sometimes there was some half-hearted throwing of tools, some swears, and some scolding, but it lacked the heart it used to have.
“He wouldn’t stop. We had to catch him.”
“Who, Sideswipe? Is there someone else down there we have to find?” Ratchet asked, looking up with a serious light to his optics.
“I think that he left the engine room. I never knew that Percy ran so fast.”
Both Ratchet and Wheeljack stiffened. “Excuse me…?”
“We asked him to stop,” Sideswipe said, looking up with a disturbing smile on his face. “We wanted him to get those wounds checked. They were splashing energon everywhere. And his optics were very red. Sorta like a Decepticon’s. I don’t think he heard us, though. He just kept running through the halls, so we tried to chase him. We never really caught him, though.”
He looked down, his smile still in place. “I bet we could catch him later. All that energon was enough to make the floor slippery and nearly made a stream in the Ark where he walked. He can’t run so fast forever. But… maybe we’re not the ones supposed to catch him. His scalpel looked really bloody, though.”
The medical tray in Wheeljack’s hands clattered to the floor.
“Wildfire is reluctant to keep this off the records,” Prowl said quietly, looking out the window slowly. “Everyone’s skittish behavior is already aggravating him.”
Wildfire was a high-ranking official on Cybertron, and though he was not known for mercy or the like, he did his job effectively. His division was in charge of collecting information on the Decepticons and making spare parts for medical teams to use on Autobots whose limbs were destroyed. How those two functions crossed over and got caught in the same group, no one was quite sure, but the division did both well.
Of course, when he noticed how many spare parts were going to the Ark, he decided to go down there for an inspection. A team had gone up to Cybertron and visited him two months beforehand; if he had only asked them, he could have saved himself a lot of trouble. But he had decided that a surprise inspection would be best.
Anyone could have told him that most of the spare parts went to Wheeljack and the twins.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out that he was impatient with everyone grieving. He wasn’t a very sympathetic character, though Optimus had managed to convince him that they had to be cut a little slack with current events.
Prowl looked back at the window, his wings twitching. “The psychic is here. I came to tell you that as well. Her name is Ember Fox, and her assistant is named Jason Furman. Apparently, Ember is the one who sees the clearest and Jason draws a picture of what he senses. They’ll probably come in, say that there’s a ghost, ‘exorcise’ it, then go.”
“It doesn’t matter to me what resources it takes or what they say, as long as it gives our men some peace of mind,” Optimus sighed, standing up slowly.
“I suppose that is all that matters,” Prowl agreed.
Optimus and Prowl left side-by-side, the former straightening his posture and the latter stiffening his doorwings. By the time they had come to the entrance of the Ark, they both had redressed in their ‘unaffected military official’ uniform.
Beachcomber was talking softly to the two humans when the tactician and commander found them. Red Alert was huddled in the corner, his glitch refusing to let him leave, but his fear of the whole matter threatening to crash him anyway.
There was a female and a male human. The female had red-blond hair that curled a little, falling to the small of her back. Her eyes were a golden color, something everyone assumed to be caused by contact lenses. She was tall and composed, but her fingers twitched nervously every so often. And it didn’t look like the twitching was caused by the presence of the comparatively huge Autobots.
The male, presumably Jason, was smaller, wirier, and had mousy brown hair. His fingers were stained with what looked like a combination of black paint, dye, and charcoal and his dark eyes glanced back and forth jumpily, as though he were expecting the shadows to come out and swallow him up in a moment’s notice. He had a little satchel, probably filled with drawing and art supplies, wrapped loosely around his hip, constantly threatening to fall off completely but seeming to never carry through. He had a blank canvas held under his arm, shifting it a little every once in a while and pulling up his satchel.
“Hi, I’m Ember, and this is Jason,” the woman said, coming forward with her hand outstretched. “We were called about a spirit?”
“A possible one,” Optimus corrected gently, kneeling down and taking the hand between his thumb and forefinger carefully, shaking it slightly. “Some of my men believe that this place is haunted.”
He didn’t offer any more information to possibly be leaked to the human media, but neither Ember nor Jason seemed to mind. “Alright! Just take us to the place of most disturbance and we’ll tell you whether or not there’s a spook out for mischief.”
Optimus straightened, and for a moment, he wasn’t sure where they should go. The engine room? Beachcomber’s room? Around the Ark in general?
“The lab.”
Beachcomber spoke softly, be he was loud enough to be heard. “Have you, like, seen Ratchet and Wheeljack lately? The lab. Definitely.”
“Okay then! Lead the way,” Ember said cheerily, clapping her hands together.
“It’s just down here,” Optimus said, holding out an arm and walking through the one place Perceptor had spent most of his time in in life, and the place he took his own. Prowl followed because he felt that it would be proper for him to be there. Red Alert and Beachcomber followed for reasons of their own.
The door to the lab swished open and the heads of Ratchet and Wheeljack looked up sharply. They didn’t say anything. Ratchet just frowned and Wheeljack looked worried. The medic had been against bringing a ‘psychic’ into the matter, but at this point, the engineer was willing to believe anything.
They shuffled to the side, abandoning their current yet half-hearted project, and Optimus let the group inside.
Ember nodded to him, smiling as she walked into the room jauntily. “Thanks for that. I have no clue how you can remember your way through those halls; I’d be totally lo-”
She stopped as she turned her gaze to the room, her smile falling away and her pupils dilating. There was a clatter, and the Cybertronians looked to see that Jason had dropped his canvas.
“It’s so… so… bloody in here. It’s everywhere,” she whispered, scanning the room. She froze and all color still within her drained from her face. She let out an ear-shattering scream and fell to the ground, completely out cold.
Jason snatched his canvas up and spun around. “Grab her and run!” was all he said before he sprinted out.
Most of the Autobots were certain that this was an act, but they played along. Prowl gently picked up the fallen woman and they all filed out swiftly, Ratchet and Wheeljack tagging along.
They found Jason in the med bay, somehow having managed to get on one of the berths, and he was painting furiously on his canvas. His hands were enormously steady despite the fear his paleness and abrupt departure spoke of, and he was muttering to himself softly. “Didn’t think… Didn’t think that alien spirits became ghosts…”
Ratchet frowned, taking Ember from Prowl and rifling through one of his drawers. He took out a tiny human-sized tablet, and with remarkable dexterity he brought it just below the woman’s nose and broke it.
Ember snapped awake, coughing and shaking her head. “Ouch. Ow. They’ve… they’ve never done that before…”
“Done what?” Ratchet asked, an undertone of anger in his voice. If this human femme was going to take advantage of his bonded’s death for personal gain, he couldn’t promise that he wouldn’t throw her across the room.
“You didn’t tell us everything, did you?” Jason muttered, still painting without pause.
Ember clambered into a sitting position and looking up with a… glare on her face? “You have one seriously pissed off ghost. Possibly the most pissed off one I’ve ever met. Ghosts like that DO NOT haunt a place. They haunt people. You KNEW him,” she accused, a furious red coming to her face.
Ratchet stiffened along with everyone else. How did she know? They had made sure that nothing of Perceptor’s suicide got out into the media, so she couldn’t have researched it beforehand by conventional means…
“He… he… he d-died last month.” Wheeljack made a sound like he was swallowing, and it took him a moment to force the next thing from his vocalizer. “He committed suicide.”
“That’s not possible,” Jason said, still concentrating on the painting. “Suicide ghosts only hang around because of regret, the remembrance of something they forgot to do in life, or to watch what happens in the wake of their death. They’re sad. Not angry. Suicide ghosts don’t get violent unless they’re mentally ill.”
“Well what else could it have been?” Ratchet asked darkly, putting Ember onto the berth with Jason and turning away. “All the evidence pointed towards it. He’d been upset for a month before. We tried talking to him, but he wouldn’t say what was the matter. Then we find him on the lab floor dead with a bloody scalpel in his hand.” He wrapped his arms around himself, his optics glazing for a moment. “We should’ve tried harder to talk to him.”
Ember was silent for a long moment. “You both.” She pointed to Ratchet and Wheeljack slowly. “You were close to him. I’d guess either lovers or brothers. I can sense him around you, but it’s not entirely an angry energy like in the lab.”
“We were his bonded, actually,” Wheeljack said quietly, looking at the floor.
“It’s the rough equivalent of marriage in your culture, only it is the linking of minds and souls instead of the exchange of vows and rings,” Ratchet said.
“How do you know all this?” Red Alert asked the humans, his horns sparking lightly.
Ember looked up at him, a scowl in place. “Look, I know that most of you hired us expecting a bunch of frauds out for a little money. You probably expected us to walk around with a cross or something, then after a bit say that you’re spirit-free. But no. I have never seen a spirit like that.”
“Look at me! I only saw him for a moment and I can paint him exactly as I saw him! He was just so vivid…” Jason stuck the handle of his brush in between his teeth and twirled around the painting. “Is that your bonded?”
Ratchet and Wheeljack only needed to glance at it briefly. Wheeljack let out a small wail and spun around, hiding his face. “I told you! I TOLD you! He’s angry. He’s so angry. Oh Percy, we would’ve tried harder! I swear! We never thought… we never thought that you…”
Ratchet kept staring at the picture, his lips drawn in a tight frown.
“That’s exactly how he looked in my room,” Beachcomber said softly.
It was Perceptor, but at the same time not. His soft smile wasn’t there, but instead there was a furious snarl on his face. He was in a crouching position, as if he were about to pounce on the person looking at him. His optics were red, and every wound that had been there when he died was fresh and bleeding energon freely, splashing it across the floor.
“He’s not angry at you for not stopping him or figuring out what was wrong. He didn’t commit suicide, and he’s angry that you think so and those who know otherwise are keeping their mouths shut. That spirit is not a suicide. That spirit was murdered,” Ember said darkly.