Fandom: Transformers: Prime

Ship: Ratchet/Wheeljack

Rating: Teen

Wordcount: 3,555

Notes:

And then somehow, miraculously, thank the Allspark, they survived it. Soundwave took the bait and left without spotting either of them. Wheeljack was still alive, still able to speak, when Ratchet found him. And there was a sheltered hollow nearby where Ratchet could push Wheeljack down onto a boulder and examine his injured leg. The relief between them was palpable, overwhelming.

Which meant that, all right, maybe Wheeljack took him by surprise. But that has hardly Ratchet's fault; he was a medic, for Primus's sake, and he was attending to a patient who was, by all appearances, halfway to terminal shutdown. Except that apparently his vitals were not, in fact, as dire as Ratchet's preliminary scans suggested, because a bot as badly injured as Wheeljack had seemed to be would not likely want to grab his medic by the jaw hinges -- while the aforementioned medic was busy performing a hydraulics recalibration procedure, no less -- and manhandle him into a kiss.

"What--" he said against the hard line of Wheeljack's mouth, undignified, his processors whirring to a confused halt. Wheeljack's chuckle vibrated through him, and that was-- well.

The angle was, without a doubt, supremely awkward, and Ratchet's back struts ached in protest at the strange contortions, but he found himself nonetheless balancing one hand on Wheeljack's thigh so he could hook two digits of the other between the plates that joined Wheeljack's neck and shoulder, pull him closer. Dimly, he registered that this was a horrible idea: the two of them necking like a couple of rookies just past protoform, out in the semi-open on what was effectively enemy territory, Soundwave liable to return any second if he took more than a cursory glance at Laserbeak. But he couldn't seem to get this information properly absorbed in his neural net, not past the nervous energy thrumming through him.

Ultimately, it was only the telltale thwonk of denting armor that kicked his processors back into gear.

Ratchet pulled back and straightened abruptly. He probed his forehead armor gently and, sure enough, there it was: a vertical dent, just off-centre, a good four or five microhics deep, and precisely the same length as Wheeljack's frontal helm protrusion. "Oh, for the love of--" He glared at Wheeljack.

Wheeljack just smiled sunnily back up at him. "Sorry, doc," he said, clearly not sorry at all. "Hazards of my make."

"What, that's not hard, is it? Bulkhead tells me you do it for him all the time."

"Yes, but there is a difference between fixing someone else's injury and fixing one that's situated directly between your own optics! And besides," Ratchet added, mostly to himself, "I had always assumed Bulkhead's dents were due to carelessness or inattention. Little did I know your helm was its own lethal weapon." His fans upcycled and he huffed, irritated.

"Yeah, well." Something in Wheeljack's tone was different, when had that happened? "Once a Wrecker, always a Wrecker," he said, then stood up.

"Anyway. We can't stay here. I need to get going, and you need to get back to base."

He turned and began to walk stiffly away, and Ratchet frowned. "Wait," he said, putting careful pressure on either side of the dent until it thwonked back into place. "Are you saying you aren't returning to base? Wheeljack, I really cannot recommend that, I barely managed to--"

"I'm fine. You did good work." Wheeljack transformed and revved his ridiculous human-style engines. "I'm heading for the Jackhammer. You can join me or not, up to you." And he drove off. Ratchet rolled his eyes, transformed into ambulance mode, and followed him.

They drove in a sort of tight, heavy silence. Even when the Jackhammer came into view, even when Ratchet requested a ground bridge and they transformed back, Wheeljack refused to look at him. "I still advise that you return to base," Ratchet said finally, exasperated. "You require a thorough examination."

Wheeljack began to look the Jackhammer over. "The only thing I require right now is some hole sealant. And trust me, the Jackhammer here is in more need of repair than me."

Well, there was going to be no other time for it. "Listen, Wheeljack." Ratchet frowned and cast his optics down. "I want to...thank you, for your backup." The words sounded clumsy even to him, and he fought off a childish wave of embarrassment.

"Yep," Wheeljack replied. He was still focused on the Jackhammer, still running his hands across it as the ground bridge appeared at Ratchet's back. Ratchet gave up and turned to it; he knew a dismissal when he heard one. It was only as he made his way towards the glowing bridge that he heard Wheeljack say, faintly, "See you around, Ratchet."

Ratchet disliked the gratification he felt at that. He didn't turn back.

--

But as obstinate as Wheeljack was, as frustrated as Ratchet felt at being knocked off-centre by a few ill-advised kisses, it had been a long time since he'd related to another of his kind in this way, and that final farewell from Wheeljack gave him hope. Hope that things could be different, somehow, eventually. And maybe they could have been, but...but then, before he could process any of what happened, before he could so much as refresh his optic screen, Bulkhead was hurt. And it was only a few breems before Wheeljack was there, back at base after all, looking straight to Ratchet for a damage report. Ratchet had nothing to offer but the truth, and he had never felt so helpless.

"Wheeljack will most likely do something rash, you know," he murmured to Optimus as the four of them watched Wheeljack's bumpers disappear from view.

Optimus made a faint noise of assent. "And I am not sure we could stop him if we wanted to."

The four of them fell silent against the steady hum of the medical equipment, and really, Ratchet thought, that was the crux of it: none of them wanted to stop him. Bulkhead was one of them, he was family, and he was lying in deep stasis on a dirty table in a makeshift medbay. Wheeljack, at least, could do something about it.

Ratchet hoped he could, anyway.

--

Their collective sympathy for Wheeljack's emotional state lasted about as long as it took them to realize that Miko was missing. She had stormed off, claiming to be heading home, shortly before Wheeljack's arrival; when Bumblebee returned to base later than normal the following morning with Rafael but no Miko, it didn't take long for any of them to put two and two together.

By the time the pair of them trudged back into base that afternoon, Ratchet was about ready to cut off Wheeljack's air intake passages with his own hands.

Arcee got there first: she worried over Miko, and spoke curtly and coldly to Wheeljack. (That was a talent Ratchet had always admired in her, that she could convey more with her mere tone than he had ever managed to express through words.) Wheeljack, for his part, got the message quickly, and -- once they had ascertained that Miko, other than appearing to be about half a breem away from involuntary power-down, was no worse for wear -- he took his leave.

--

They did not hear from Wheeljack again for some time. Arcee seemed grimly pleased with this, and Ratchet, well. Yes, he was angry, and he asked Optimus not to contact Wheeljack himself for backup, but as Bulkhead's condition improved, the anger faded; he thought about how he would feel if someone close to him, someone like Optimus, had come so close to the scrapyard and he could do nothing to save him. Not even Unicron himself could have stopped him then, he thought, and he was a medic, a healer, not a black ops specialist. Vengeance was practically Wheeljack's modus operandi. So he had intended to contact Wheeljack eventually, not so much to apologize as to, oh, he didn't know. Offer a show of friendship. And remind him not to put one of the children in danger again or Ratchet would have his head, frag every oath he had ever taken.

It was just -- he barely had time to think, these days, between monitoring Bulkhead's recovery process and worrying about the impending threat of Megatron decoding the Iacon database before their own inferior human computers could and navigating the troupe of human children who insisted on scurrying around underfoot. After all of Bulkhead's repairs he was even lower on energon than normal, they all were, and he barely had time for a few hours' recharge each night, much less taking time out of his day to locate Wheeljack and patch himself through to him.

And besides, he thought after some time had passed, what would he say? Just checking in? Glad to see you're not offline yet? Please. Ratchet was hardly going to stoop to bridging the gap just to fumble out a "so what did it all mean," not at his age and especially not during a time like this. It could wait, Primus willing. Cybertron's fate was at stake for the second time in their lives, and Ratchet would need to devote all his attention to the relics and their plans to attain them if he wanted to ensure he would not fail his home again.

--

It came as a minor shock to him, then, when Wheeljack made contact himself. It was late, Earth's moon was high and sharp-edged in the clear sky outside their base, and Ratchet's processors refused to spin down enough for recharge to take him. They cycled through their current situation, all the possible eventualities, all the ways in which they could lose to Megatron and lose their home again, and eventually Ratchet decided that if his body refused to sleep, he might as well do something useful. He was at the computer, monitoring their security systems, when Wheeljack's voice crackled, cheery, through the comm.

"Morning, doc."

Ratchet jumped. He gripped the edge of the desk and eyed the offending computer warily. "Wheeljack?"

"The one and only."

"What's this about? Do you require backup? Where are you?"

Wheeljack chuckled. "Nah. My scanners caught some weird activity in a mountain range maybe four, five thousand hics from your cubbyhole. Figured maybe some cons found another energon deposit so I'm on my way to check it out, but I doubt it's much of anything. Gonna take a while to get there, is all."

"Oh," Ratchet replied, relaxing his grip. He wasn't disappointed, really: things were dire enough for them as it was without Optimus barging into yet another Decepticon hive with his merry band of misfits right on his wheels. A quick fight, though -- provided they weren't as horribly outnumbered as usual -- might have provided a decent distraction on a night like tonight. Then something occurred to him. "Wait, how did you know that someone would be powered up to open the comm line? I know you have a perfectly good grasp of differential solar time; you must have realized that at this joor everyone on base is likely in recharge."

"Right, that. It's something me and Raf cooked up not long ago, when you and the gang were out on some sort of recon."

"What sort of 'something'?" Ratchet said warily.

"Eh, just a little thing. Raf said he was experimenting with the communications networks, wanted to see if he could put together a more efficient system. Got this screen, now, it tells me when someone is logged into one of those clunky human computers you got there -- sorta like that instant whatever the kids are always using." Wheeljack sounded pleased with himself, but then, when didn't he? "So as soon as you logged in, I got this alert, and I guessed you were having a late night. Pretty handy. This is the first real chance I've had to try it out."

A clever idea, Ratchet thought. Aloud, he said, "Hm."

"Yeah, yeah, I know you're impressed. That kid can think on his feet."

Ratchet frowned. "All the same, I do wish he had run it by me before implementing it, so I could--"

"So you could what?" Wheeljack said, and there was that edge to his voice again, the same one that manifested when he refused Ratchet's medical aid. Ratchet's frown deepened. "So you could give it the go-ahead and take half the credit for it?"

"Excuse me?"

He sighed obviously. Ratchet felt his temper gauges rise. "Whatever, doc, I've seen how you intellectual types work. Raf wanted to give it a try on someone before he showed it to you, because he thought it would be practical and he wanted it to work. Which you'd get if you didn't care more about the ideas than how they could help people."

"And what, precisely, is that supposed to mean?"

"Exactly what I said." Wheeljack's voice was as level as ever, but something in his tone was freezing over. "You don't get it. No one from the elite classes ever do. Getting credit for something, creating this chain of command so you can feel superior to whoever did the actual work to make it, it's more important to you than what that something can actually do to make people's lives easier."

"Oh please," Ratchet said. His patience was wearing thin. "That's not true at all, and I'm not going to let you take your anger--"

"Really? Then how come you get all worked up about a facial dent that you could fix in less than a nanoklik? Right, because you never spent your days in the fields getting full up with dents that could hurt your pretty looks a lot worse than that." Ratchet spluttered at this, but Wheeljack cut right over him. "Whatever, doc, I'm not doing this. Maybe I was wrong, maybe you did just want that kid to get your permission to try his own invention so you could make sure it was safe, but you're still from a world I decided centuries ago I was done getting involved with."

He cut the comm link. Ratchet stared at the computer screen, flabbergasted.

--

To Ratchet's credit, it took him barely a solar cycle of righteous indignation, this time, before Wheeljack's words started to weigh on him. Unfortunately, the race for the Omega keys had begun, and he was -- and they all were -- out of time.

--

And then it was done, and they had lost. They had lost. Their base destroyed, scattered into scraps of metal and so much useless dust. Their home gone for the second time, the final time, every hope of its restoration destroyed in a single sweep of their own Prime's sword. Optimus-- Optimus vanquished, broken, with not even so much as a proper goodbye.

They had lost. Wheeljack's appearance in the final moments, his cocksure voice and breezy confidence, had given Ratchet a last, perverse glimmer of hope -- hope of being forgiven, hope of Wheeljack's backup being sufficient in preserving, improbably, some measure of the life he once had -- but they had lost, and there was nothing left. All to save this useless planet, this planet full of creatures who feared them, hated them, a land that could not sustain them. Millennia of fighting, sacrifices beyond enumeration, and they had lost.

Ratchet did not remember hiding, waiting for the Decepticons to leave, though he knew he must have. He did not remember patching through to Arcee, but her voice was there, updating him, through the ringing in his ears, on the situation.

"Ratchet?" she said, after a long moment's pause.

"What is it," he replied, and his voice sounded foreign to his ears.

"Am I right in thinking you bridged yourself somewhere close to base? To, well, to what was the base."

She always was astute. "Yes. I wanted to remain closeby, in case I could help--" He paused to clear his vocalizers of static. "In case I could still be of some assistance."

"The rest of us are a long way away, still, and we don't know how long it'll be before the cons come back. You should probably see if you can find Wheeljack."

"Wheeljack. Right."

Arcee paused another moment. "Obviously I'm not sure of the exact coordinates, but judging by the datalog, the Jackhammer was passing by a mountain just west of the base when his signal went offline."

"Thank you, Arcee."

He transformed mechanically and started searching in long sweeps around the ruins of their base, widening the radius each time; it was no more than five or six breems of this before he spotted the smoking remains of the Jackhammer at the base of a mountain, just as Arcee said. There was no immediate sign of Wheeljack, and Ratchet registered another hollow pang of fear within him, but upon approach he spotted the opening to a small cave closeby at the mountain's base.

"Wheeljack?" he called out, transforming and peering inside the cave. It was dark, but his optics focused and he made out the dark outline of a cybertronian shape.

Wheeljack's voice was faint when he replied: "Hey, doc. Fancy seeing you here."

Ratchet made his way inside, a faint, numbed sort of relief seeping into his circuits. Wheeljack was seated on the ground, venting shallowly. "Wheeljack," he said again. "Are you hurt? Sit up on that ledge, I need to examine you."

"Nah," he said, but he carefully maneuvered himself onto the ledge of rock. His left arm hung motionless by his side. "Barely scratched my finish. That con couldn't hit a scraplet in a glass crate."

"Of course," Ratchet said absently, grabbing hold of the dislocated arm. Disconnected from his central cyberkinetic systems, it looked like, and the fragile cords within were damaged. "This will need replacing." Wheeljack started to say something, but Ratchet waved him off and moved on to the wound in his left side. "He missed your T-cog, somehow, but a lot of your core sensors here have been damaged. And it looks like you lost a lot of energon."

Wheeljack grinned at him; it looked painful. "I told you, I'm feeling great. Where's--"

"What, did you rattle your cranial chamber too?" Ratchet snapped. He glared at Wheeljack and started assessing the damage to his leg supports. Wheeljack shifted restlessly under his hands.

"Hey, doc, are you--"

"How many times do I have to ask you not to call me that? And I am fine, now if you would please sit still so I can perform a cursory scan--"

"Doc. Ratchet," Wheeljack said, and the strange inflection in Wheeljack's voice made him pause. Wheeljack grabbed Ratchet by the arm with his good hand. "Would you tell me what happened already? Where's the rest of the gang?"

Ratchet made to shake Wheeljack off, but Wheeljack held fast, and that seemed to flip some switch deep within his consciousness; all at once, Ratchet felt the excess charge escape him, and a sense of vague horror trickled in to replace it. He straightened up, laboriously, and sat down on the rock ledge himself. "They're fine. Most of them. I didn't have time to bridge them all to different places, so the four of them regrouped, and the children are all safe with Bumblebee. They -- well, they had better be, after what..." He sighed and registered the static creeping back into his own voice. His voice box would need a thorough recalibration. "Jack's mother is safe as well. She is in hiding. However, Agent Fowler's whereabouts are unknown, and Bulkhead and Smokescreen are on their way back to whatever remains of the base, to search for some sign of...well."

An awful, dense moment passed between them. Wheeljack finished for him. "Of your Prime."

"Yes." Ratchet laughed, and it sounded hollow even to his own audial receptors. "As you may have guessed, we do not have high hopes."

Wheeljack slid his grip down Ratchet's arm, put pressure on his hand. It was comforting; Ratchet hated that. "I'm sorry, champ. Can't say I knew him well, but he was a good Prime. I know the lot of you cared about him."

He nodded and stared at the opposite wall of the cave, at its dark, damp dips and protrusions. "Yes," he said, "we did," and he laughed again, because they had lost and Optimus was gone and he didn't know what else to do. Wheeljack tightened the grip on his hand. "I'm sorry," Ratchet offered uselessly.

"I know. It's okay."

Wheeljack turned to look at him, and Ratchet moved without thinking it through: he leaned over and kissed Wheeljack, with perhaps more force than he meant to, perhaps more roughly than he meant to, but, he thought wildly, when had any of his intentions ever come to fruition?

For a moment, Wheeljack froze, and then he pushed Ratchet back. Not far, but enough. His optics were narrow, focused in a way that made Ratchet dimly furious. "Doc," he said quietly. "I can't fix this."

"I know," Ratchet said, and he leaned in again. Wheeljack yielded, this time, kissed him back and opened beneath him; let him pretend, for now, that he still had something left.