Work Text:
Ratchet knew it was getting bad. He’d run enough field hospitals that the ebb and surge of casualties was as familiar as the Deltaaran shift change used to be, and when he could spare the attention to clock new arrivals, he could just about gauge the state of a battle by the state of the wounded coming in. The latest desperates were a mess of missing limbs and mangled plating, already mismatched from old repairs, fresh wounds hastily patched or still oozing raw, dumped on the floor in a heap by squad mates who weren’t much better off. Even the patients who made it to circuit slabs for repair were dead-eyed, hopeless, haunted. There was no illusion of glory left to be had here, nor much of a hope of escape, even with the supposedly imminent arrival of the Ark. The med ward was grim with the whine of saws and hiss of welding and over it all, the ominous thunder of relentless shelling that hadn’t quite reached the hospital. The front of destruction kept getting closer, as the energy shields constricted tighter and tighter around the emitters, ceding ground meter by bloody mechanometer. The power banks were failing. A Decepticon capital ship had been parked in orbit above them for more than a vorn. The last resupply hadn’t been worth the fuel it burned.
Ratchet couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a full ration, or a rest. He was so tired. There was a haze over everything, a minor skip in his processor, dragging pain in his joints.
He didn’t realize why he’d stopped, at first. His hands were mechanically dismembering a body he’d just sent out walking a few cycles before, parts destined for seven other mechs, three of them critical, when his assessing look swept up to the face. Clean shot through the optic. Out the back of the head. Must have been a fair distance, judging from the exit wound. Made by an old style of projectile round. Precise. He’d seen flowering tears exactly like it since the very start of the war, but they were rare, now. As good as a calling card.
Just one shot, he noted clinically. Pulled a little to the left. Maybe the gunner was taken out before he could put another in the spark, leaving it to bleed out slow.
The ache in his chest wasn’t hope.
At least that particular moment of inattention didn’t result in any additional pointless deaths. With a subsonic shiver and a pop, the shields went down.
Ratchet’s head snapped up. “Incoming,” he yelled, booming through the ward. Medics and patients alike startled from their dull horror and looked to him, but it was too late; they all heard the crackling shriek of the atmosphere igniting. Ratchet locked eyes with one of the junior medics. “Get down,” he tried to say, in answer to his terror, and, “We’ll be alright, just—” but he never got the chance; through the window, he saw the coherent ragged lightning of the Worldsweeper’s main battery drag across the sky to punch through the command building three blocks away. The explosion vaporized that side of the med ward, and the junior medic was sucked out into howling plasma. Ratchet was blown the other way, through a hole in another wall, or the hole where a wall used to be; he clipped his shoulder on something unforgiving, and somewhere in that weightless flight, he lost consciousness.
He woke up under a roiling green-black sky, blasters and the deeper report of tank fire in distant stuttering echoes, loud through the high ring of his audials recalibrating. Smoke rose in wisps from the ground into a filmy bank of acrid smog. Every micrometer of him hurt. Especially his right leg, from mid-thigh down, a crawling, fiery pain. Preliminary diagnostics threw up major alerts just as his optics dragged across the ragged stump. Sensor net damage too, then. The leg was gone. It shouldn’t hurt. Internal reroute took on the third try, and he sucked in a broken gasp as prickling numbness swept through his systems in a wave so intense it was almost another kind of pain.
Other warnings flowed in sluggishly as he fought to come fully online. An escalating processor error. Chronometer out, comms down. Short-term memory scrambled; no surprise there. A network of deep fractures through his endostructure, plating dented or ripped out, energon seeping around embedded shrapnel, like he’d been hit by a missile, or used as one, and dragged through the scree. A particular foreign substance warning originating from a pinprick puncture in his left arm.
Ah. A needle. Neat enough insertion, clamped down, attached to a flexible tube. The kind of kit he associated with syphoners in the Dead End. Turning his head with heroic effort, he followed the pink line of activated fuel over and up to the source, a vision straight out of his nightmares.
Sooty grey armor. Burning red eyes. A racing frame banded in weapons and durasteel, points and angles and edges like a fistfull of knives. A flash of sharp teeth, stained pink. Someone else’s lifeblood smeared on his chin. “Hey, Doc,” the specter said.
Deadlock.
Ratchet passed out again.
Emergency defrag threw up a jumble of impressions that might have been memories. Thunder tearing through low, poisonous clouds. Jets overhead. A rough hand pressed against his face, tracing his supraorbital ridge, his cheek, his jaw, the lines of his helm. Stabilizers rebelling as he was swung unceremoniously over a heavily armored shoulder. Energon trickling down his dangling arm. The twisting curl of smoke from a hot gun barrel. Dim, intense yellow optics, searching for an answer he couldn’t give—no, not yellow. A wrenching jolt. A muffled swear. The stab of sudden light as a wall was lifted off of him, like a spark chamber breach.
The prick of a needle. Fuel levels slowly climbing.
Static.
Moving again. Ratchet’s hand tightened instinctively, but his grip was weak. Deadlock was muttering, voice low and dark, with the burrs sanded out.
“Should just shoot your other leg off. Primus, you weigh more than a tank.” Ratchet slipped against his hold. The heavy sway of a step lurched to the side as loose rubble skittered out from underfoot.
“So put me down,” Ratchet tried to say. “Stop. Just—stop.”
The grey knuckles that hitched his arms around the shoulder holster were crossed with scars, reinforced armor polished and split. In the soft light of the clinic they were delicate, almost fragile, by design and from starvation, and as Ratchet gently wiped off tacky energon. There was an ache in his chest, from struggling to keep the tangle of emotions out of his field. He’d be late for his shift, but—
That wasn’t right. He must have—there it was. Processor damage. That clinic was shut down, commandeered, finally bombed by his own side. It was half a galaxy away. Half a life. A billion lives. Halfway to the horizon, a Worldsweeper burned. Ionized atmosphere haloed slowly widening fractures in red fire as gravity dragged it down. The scorched landscape of a city reduced to debris reminded him of Rodion, after the last riot. It always did. Drift’s slight frame streaked with ash in the alley, catching Ratchet when he stumbled.
“Almost out of it. Just hang on.”
As if Ratchet had ever been any better at letting go.
A wing of seekers shot by overhead as the two of them huddled under a crumbling wall, but Ratchet wasn’t watching the sky anymore. He’d been dragged in close to keep his white and red plating out of view, tucked under the guard of Deadlock’s pistol and against his overheated chest, and he could feel every ragged ventilation as if it were his own. There was a dark panel of armor under the dim glow of his optics. It was healed, or had been replaced, but Ratchet remembered it cracked open over flickering life-light, shattered by a sniper who got his own helm shot out for his trouble. Reaching between them with his own stained fingers, Ratchet traced the arc of the seam he’d welded after frantic surgery, spark in his throat. That dark moon had been beautiful, before they destroyed it, every sound muted in thin atmosphere, planetary rings curving stark against the brilliant sky. They didn’t have stars like that in Iacon.
“You can’t keep doing this,” Ratchet said, voice hoarse, and he meant killing people , and he meant saving me .
The huff that washed over his audial wasn’t amused. “As long as I have to,” Deadlock promised.
“Processor damage,” Ratchet muttered.
A rough hand gingerly pressed against the ugly dent in his helm.
“I think yours is getting worse.”
They were in a shuttle—there was a shuttle. Small. Non-sentient. System hopper. Ratchet was strapped into a shuttle. Listing in the seat, lopsided. Missing a leg. Processor damage. Headed for the hospital? He’d be late for his shift.
“—a window, with the ’Sweeper down.” Drift was there, close, and frowning, sharp red optics searching Ratchet’s face. The kid looked like he’d been dragged through the pit. Smeared with vital fluids, bleeding from deep scrapes, chipped and charred and tired. He bared his teeth as he glanced away, and the graceful line of one of his finials ended in a ragged stub. It had to hurt. Ratchet wanted—he wanted to touch. He wanted to fix it. He wanted it not to hurt. There was a heavy ache in his chest, like a ball of molten lead. Diagnostics said he was missing a leg. “This course will keep you on the dark side of the planet long enough for the Ark to pick you up. You got that? I programmed it in, so just—”
When Ratchet woke up in the Ark’s medbay, he wasn’t sure whether the lingering ghost of lips against his forehead was a sensor glitch or a memory.
~
Ravage never made a sound unless he meant to, so Deadlock knew that the audible shift of rubble was a courtesy. He inclined his head in welcome when he spotted the spy’s low outline next to the wall. “If you’re looking for a smoke, I hate to disappoint,” he said. “I’ve been out for a year.”
Ravage prowled out of the shadows, circling slowly closer. “Haven’t you heard? Those things will kill you.” Neither of them laughed. Deadlock turned back to the gun in his hands, putting it together again, every piece meticulously cleaned and polished.
He’d found a good perch, overlooking a blasted field of corpses. Most of the building was stable, if crumbling, with the top floors open to the sky. Off in the middle distance, the discovery of more enemy stragglers was punctuated with three quick shots. Ravage selected a patch of unburnt flooring and delicately sat. Fine black plating rippled in a smooth line.
“I’m sure your medic would recommend that you quit,” he added, as if it were an afterthought.
Deadlock felt himself go still.
“Relax. I won’t report it.” Ravage’s bladed tail flicked through the air, and Deadlock forced himself to cycle a breath. “I’m just telling you to be more careful. The shuttle was pressing your luck.”
Deadlock eyed him warily. “I thought I was all out of favors with you.”
The tip of Ravage’s tail twitched again before settling, curled around his feet. The light touch of his field was tinged with—not a softness, or a sadness, but a strange shade of regret. “That’s never been true, and this wouldn’t have counted, anyway. The Dead End medic—you’re not the only one who still owes him.”
Together they watched the pinprick lights of the Autobot ships claw desperately out of the system in full retreat, leaving the Decepticons to the rubble.