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“This is going to blow your paint off,” Swerve promised the small crowd clustered around the bar, as he plugged in a thick cord to the side of a device almost bigger than he was. “Energon slushies are gonna be the next big thing, just you wait and see.”
Ratchet watched from his booth. Vaguely entertained, but not curious enough to get up for a closer look. Swerve was narrating loud enough to be perfectly audible from the table, anyway.
He was pleasantly buzzed, and pleasantly bored. Next to him on the rounded bench seat, Velocity and Nautica were carrying on a conversation that he was nominally participating in by grunting every once in a while. They were all at Swerve’s to celebrate Velocity successfully getting her certificate in sensornet tuning and calibration. Ratchet had never had any doubts in her ability, but Velocity’d been so nervous going into the final test she’d practically vibrated. Now, her giddy, relieved happiness was infectious.
Drift was lost in the crowd somewhere up by the bar, getting them all another round. Ratchet propped his chin up on his fist, optical feed going out of focus as he let the background hum of the room flow over him.
Swerve’s voice drifted over, raised in excitement. “Okay, everyone, watch this!”
An audial-glitching, motorized roar slammed through Ratchet’s reverie. Nautica and Velocity jumped in their seats, Nautica swearing as she banged her knee on the underside of the table.
Ratchet was on his feet before he was even aware of moving. His vision and head cleared as excess charge suddenly found use as half-a-dozen of his idling systems all onlined at once. Combat protocols shunted every unrelated thought tree to background processing and suddenly, jarringly, he wasn’t sure where he was.
It didn’t matter where he was, his protocols told him. What mattered was he had a civilian and a junior medic here with him and they were in danger.
“Ratchet, what’s wrong—?” Velocity started to ask, before interrupting herself with a startled yelp as Ratchet grabbed the edge of the table and heaved it up.
Metal screamed as bolts ripped out of the floor. The table landed on its side with a crash. Ratchet grabbed Velocity and Nautica and dragged them down into cover with him.
“What’s going on?” Velocity said, her voice high and alarmed. Her optics were wide and confused. The poor kid probably didn’t have a single combat protocol on her hard drive.
“Keep it together,” he told her. “You’re going to be fine, but I need you sharp.”
“What?”
Ratchet pulled his pistol out of subspace.
“What?” Velocity’s voice skipped up a few more registers, but Ratchet ignored her, straining his audials to hear what was going on beyond their shelter.
The grrr of the chainsaw had mellowed from its initial roar, but it was still so loud. There were people yelling. Sounds of confusion. He couldn’t tell if the attacker was on the move or not. He couldn’t get a good picture of what was happening out there.
He glanced over at Velocity and Nautica’s scared faces. For a moment, they were layered over with another, different pair of scared faces.
“Ratchet, what the absolute slag?” Nautica said.
“Shut up, ‘Aid,” Ratchet said, distractedly. He still couldn’t get a good handle on Pharma’s movements, or how many other mechs were out there, and how many of them were friendlies. It was making creating an exit plan very difficult, and he kept getting little orange alerts in his HUD warning him that he was having serious data-processing errors, even though he couldn’t remember taking damage, so who knew how much of what he was hearing was even real. It was pandemonium.
Then, quieter, but somehow still audible over the din, Drift’s voice.
That jarred Ratchet. He felt a twisty dissonance as two of his systems started feeding him contradictory data. Drift wasn’t supposed to be here, was he? No, it was Ratchet, and First Aid, and Ambulon, and—
“Primus damn it,” Drift snarled. There was a loud crash and the growl of the chainsaw went screechy and strange before cutting out. It left a strange ringing in Ratchet’s audials.
“Hey!” someone shouted.
Ratchet shook his head, trying to reset his sensors.
“Back, back, back, back!” Drift’s voice came faintly, barely distinguishable over the feedback. “Swerve, I love you, but if you don’t back up, I’m going to stab you.”
“This is my bar!” someone said indignantly.
“Should we call Ultra Magnus? Or Megatron?” someone else said nervously.
“Hey, I’m the captain. Why don’t you call me?”
“You’re already here. And you don’t know what to do.”
“Okay, that’s true, but still—“
“Yeah, I’m gonna call Ultra Magnus—“
“No,” Drift snapped, voice cracking out like a whip. “Nobody call anyone. Don’t move, don’t talk, let me handle this. No one is going to get hurt,” he added, an afterthought.
“You just threatened to stab me.”
“No one’s going to get hurt if you do what I say. I’m going to talk to him.”
Footsteps approached their cover. Drift’s voice called out again, “Ratchet?”
“I’m here,” Ratchet called back. It still felt like there was feedback in his sensors, an uncomfortable, background hum, but he couldn’t identify the source. Couldn’t pinpoint if it was internal or external. He still couldn’t remember taking any damage even though error messages were still clogging up his HUD. If he’d been hit in the head hard enough, it might be messing with his memory.
But it would have to wait. His combat protocols surged into the foreground, reminding him that anything less than imminent spark failure could be ignored. His priority was keeping his people safe and alive. He knew he couldn’t stop Pharma, but he had to try. Every ounce of his programming said he had to try, not matter what.
“Ratchet?” Drift called again, and Ratchet realized with a swoop of fear that Drift was still out there in the open.
He rose up in a crouch. When no one took a pot shot at his finials sticking out, he stood all the way up and grabbed Drift by the shoulder with one hand. He dragged Drift over the top of the table and down to the ground.
“Oh scrap, is he attacking him?” someone yelped.
“No, I’m fine, shut up, thanks!” Drift called. He let Ratchet nudge him until he was squished in with Nautica and Velocity, pressed back against the material of the booth, in the deepest cover.
“Are you both okay?” Drift asked.
“Is he going to hurt us?” Nautica said nervously.
“Of course not,” Drift said at the same time Ratchet said, “No one’s hurting you on my watch, kid.” Nautica did not look any less nervous.
Nautica was staring intently at Drift, but Velocity was looking back at Ratchet. A frown pressing her brow plates together.
“Ratchet,” she said carefully, “do you think someone is attacking us right now?”
Drift made a slashing motion at her with one hand, a “fall back” gesture. She hesitated before falling silent, her lips pressed together in an unhappy line as she glanced back and forth between Drift and Ratchet.
Ratchet shook his head again jerkily, like that would somehow clear it. Something was off, he knew it. Drift and Velocity and Nautica shouldn’t be here. That wasn’t how it happened. It wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. He couldn’t let him hurt Velocity, couldn’t let another young medic in his care be cut down for no other crime of being there and being Ratchet’s.
His fingers curled into fists—or tried to, there was still a gun in one of them, creaking now under the pressure—a constant, ugly reminder of the one sin Pharma would never forgive him for. The reason why he’d never stop until he’d taken everything from Ratchet.
“Ratchet.” Drift’s voice cut through the noise. Ratchet looked up, startled, meeting his tense optics. “If you squeeze that gun any harder, it’s going to explode.”
Ratchet glanced down at his pistol. It was, actually, starting to warp a little in his grip.
“Do you want to give that to me?”
“What? No, I need—“
“You don’t,” Drift said firmly. “Sorry, Ratty, you know I’d do this slower, but we’re in Swerve’s bar on the Lost Light. It’s the 49th of Cycle 503. Pharma is dead. He isn’t here. He can’t hurt anyone. You’re safe, I’m here with you, and I need you to give me that gun before someone gets hurt.”
Ratchet winced as another flood of errors lit up the corner of his vision. “But—“
“Gun, Ratchet.”
Ratchet hesitated. He did not want to give up his weapon—or maybe he did. He didn’t want anyone to get hurt, and was feeling more confused by the second. The medical coding that was always running in the back of his processor told him helpfully that mechs showing signs of extreme confusion should not be allowed to wave guns around, for their own and everyone else’s safety. Still—
“But—I heard—you heard,” Ratchet said, trying wrestle reality into a shape that made sense.
“That was Swerve’s slushie machine.” A look of vague guilt passed over Drift’s face. “Which I probably broke when I kicked it off the bar. It was just a dumb, loud machine.”
Ratchet still hesitated.
Drift blew air out his vents. “Ratchet, you’re safe with me, okay? I need you to trust me. I promise I’m not going to let anything bad happen. You know you can trust me.”
He did know he could trust Drift. That was what had him reluctantly holding the gun out, butt first, for Drift to take.
“You’re a better shot than me, anyway,” he said, partly to quiet his combat protocols, who were screaming at him not to give up his primary weapon in a combat zone, was he some kind of idiot?
“I’m a better shot than everyone.” Drift took his pistol, secreting it away somewhere in his subspace. Nautica let out something which sounded suspiciously like a relieved sigh, and both Drift and Velocity relaxed incrementally.
Ratchet leaned back against the cold metal of the table. He brought his hands up to press into his optics.
“Dammit,” he muttered into the dark of his palms.
“Everyone’s okay. We’re all safe; we’re on the Lost Light, in Swerve’s bar,” Drift repeated. “No one is trying to hurt you or Velocity or Nautica or anyone else.”
“Okay,” Ratchet said.
“Let’s do the counting exercise, okay? Invent with me first. One, two—“
“I know how to do the slagging counting exercise,” Ratchet snapped, letting his hands fall. “I taught you the slagging counting exercise.”
Drift didn’t flinch back at Ratchet’s tone. He never did, even when Ratchet wished he would. He looked back at Ratchet, calm and steady. Drift had his own nightmares, his own times when all he could do was cling to Ratchet’s armor and sob, but never when Ratchet needed him. When Ratchet needed him, he was always solid as durasteel.
Ratchet felt a wave of guilt wash over him then. This is what he did to people. He lashed out, he took and didn’t give back, he drove them away by being stubborn and sullen and thoughtless.
“I’m sorry,” said Ratchet.
“It’s okay,” Drift said.
They counted the bolts on the underside of the table. Then Drift made him list everything he could hear in the room, then everything he could smell, and by the time he’d started listing everything his electromagnetic sensors could feel, Ratchet was exhausted. His combat protocols had slipped restlessly into the background, not quite off yet, but not front and center. It left him feeling dizzy and off-kilter. Like he just tried to drive a race on half a tank of low-grade.
“I want to go back to the hab,” he told Drift, interrupting himself. “My helm slagging hurts.”
“Yeah, okay,” Drift agreed, not quite managing to hide his relief that Ratchet seemed to be more or less lucid again. “You okay to stand up?”
“Yeah.”
Drift stood first, and started pushing the table out. Ratchet planted his foot on the metal and shoved it, because now that he’d decided he wanted to go home, he wanted to be home now. The table screeched as it slid across the floor.
There was a nervous ring of mechs standing around the edges of the bar. Ratchet could see the slightly mangled-looking shape of Swerve’s machine listing on the bar top. Someone must have cleaned up the spilled energon and ice.
Ratchet could feel himself bristle under the gaze of so many optics, but it was Drift who snapped, “Show’s over,” and hustled them both across the room and out the door before anyone could even open their mouths.
“Velocity and Nautica—“ Ratchet started as Drift marched them double time through the halls.
“We’ll check in with them later. They’ll be okay for now.”
“I really scared them, didn’t I?”
“They’re tough. Don’t worry about them right now, okay?” Drift pressed his hand against the spark reader outside their hab. Ratchet’s plating loosened just a fraction as the door slid open, revealing the familiar, slightly cluttered room. The unmade berth. The big double desk against one wall, covered with Drift’s crystals and Ratchet’s stacks of pads.
Drift maneuvered Ratchet up onto the berth, propped up against the headboard on a few of the fluffy, alien pillows Drift had picked up on his travels.
Drift left him to putter around the hab, dimming the lights, picking up a few things, pulling out his incense. It was blissfully quiet in the room. Ratchet let himself sink into berth, watching Drift move on silent pedes.
“I need to get this slag under control,” Ratchet said to the dim, quiet hab.
Drift paused where he was lighting incense. He always lit incense when Ratchet had an episode. Ratchet didn’t especially like that stuff clogging up his vents, but he had to admit it did help. The sticky, sweet smoke smelled the exact opposite of a medbay. It smelled like Drift, who always carried a faint scent of smoke on his armor.
“You know it doesn’t work like that,” he said.
Ratchet sighed, sinking further against the berth, feeling the mesh surface feeding a trickle of charge into him through his legs. Not enough to get a full recharge, his torso would have to be in full contact with the berth for that, but enough to be comforting. “It has to work like that. I can’t keep living like this. I could have hurt someone today.”
Drift threw a tarp over his head.
Ratchet spluttered, flailing until he managed to free his head from the tarp to find Drift looking annoyed at him.
“No one got hurt,” Drift said firmly. “Stop expecting yourself to be over it. Would you treat a patient struggling with neurotrauma like this?”
Ratchet grimaced. That was his least favorite kind of question. The kind that made him regret teaching Drift enough technique while he’d been trying to help him with his neurotrauma that he could throw it back at Ratchet. If he’d known he was setting himself up like this—well, he wouldn’t have done anything different.
Drift climbed onto the berth. He hesitated, watching Ratchet carefully to see if he’d flinch back, then clambered on top of Ratchet’s lap, his weight pressing him down into the berth and back against the headboard. The bunched up tarp cushioned the hard edges of his armor.
He cupped Ratchet’s face in his hands, the tips of his fingers finding the pressure points in the creases of his helm effortlessly. Ratchet felt his helmache begin to fade.
“That feels good,” Ratchet sighed, letting his optics dim.
“Comfort the body and the mind will follow,” Drift said, which was the kind of mystical sounding mumbo-jumbo that was based in medical fact, so Ratchet couldn’t even argue. “Do you want some fuel?”
“No, but I should have some,” Ratchet said grudgingly. He’d burned a lot of energy freaking out. “Then I should sleep,” he continued before Drift could prompt him.
“And take tomorrow off.”
“I’ll be fine by tomorrow. I’m just tired,” Ratchet protested, but he knew Drift wasn’t going to budge until he agreed. “Okay,” he said after a brief staring match.
Drift rewarded him with a smile, and a quick kiss pressed against the mesh of his cheek. When he tried to get up, Ratchet caught him around the waist.
“Wait—fuel can wait a second.”
“Okay,” Drift agreed easily. He settled against Ratchet’s chest, tucking his face into the crook of Ratchet’s neck. Ratchet relaxed into it, letting his optics dim even further, until their hab was a dim, faintly purple-tinted blur. He could taste the incense with every invent. Resentfully, his combat protocols finally went all the way offline.
Ratchet exvented deeply, like Drift had taught him, like memory was nothing but dust, that he could blow out of his vents and be done with. With the quiet hum of Drift’s engine harmonizing with his, he could almost believe that was true. Maybe some day, if he kept believing it, it would be.