by K.A. Rose
Transformers and all related characters and indica © and TM Hasbro and Takara, 1984-2007. Used without permission for non-profit fan appreciation.
Whatever I'm doing with this, it's not worse than Kiss Players, okay?
-----
R&D Quarter, the Unfinished Autobot City, Earth, 1999
It was in the ugliest possible hour of pre-dawn that someone called on Wheeljack's compartments in the R&D block, rousing him from stasis. His power cells under 25%, his immediate response was the roll over back into standby, but the hammering persisted through his audio receptors and he was forced to give it up.
By the time Wheeljack arrived at the front door, three of the junior researchers and Ratchet, visiting while on leave, had also been torn out of standby to see to the noise. Wheeljack grumpily slid the door open a half-panel and squinted his optics into the twilit corridor.
His nightvision a good deal outdated, it took him a milicycle to recognise the shapes of the fire and rescue deputy Inferno and his sleeker mate Firestar, one of the more notorious recent reassignments to Metroplex's medical detachment. They stood hunched as though experiencing atmospheric phenomena, awkward and nervous and made all the worse upon seeing three interns and a surgeon peering out at them over Wheeljack's shoulder.
"Wheeljack," Inferno was able to say at length, after great duress. "We gotta bit of a problem."
It was obvious from the 'bot's tone --not at all his usual carefree, now burdened with some sort of fate worse than deactivation-- that something dreadful had gone on that was not your typical nitrate fire overtaking the armoury. In fact, the more they talked --fumbling, terrified, embarrassed, trudging into uncertain waters with vocabulary not heretofore relevant in their entire uptimes-- that this was as far from an ordinary crisis as was possible to get.
"Y'see, me an' Firestar were foolin' around in the back of the firehouse and... And it weren't nothin', I swear, we were jus'..."
"But we were taking down each other's tier-one access controls before we knew it and--"
"--and then these activation protocols came up that we ain't never seen before and--"
"--and it felt so good but then--"
"--but then--"
Firestar held out the thing she had kept cupped in her hands.
It was very small. At a glance you could mistake it for an embre, but for how its glow persisted. The shape was irregular, as though fractured from some larger whole, and its colour shifted in trembling, vibrant patterns. Despite its size, the light seemed to fill the whole of the corridor.
Five sets of scientist optics went wide.
"You know what this is, right?" Firestar asked, vocals shaking.
"You kids..." Wheeljack said, despairing. "What've you gone and done?"
"Can't you do somethin'?" Inferno begged. "You've seen these thingamajigs before, haven't you?"
Wheeljack agreed that he had, yes, but his voice was awkward when he said it, haltingly, with many glances toward the medic Ratchet. Firestar urged the tiny spark at him until he was forced to accept it, holding it uncertainly in his broad, scuffed hands.
"Sir," said one of his students. "Is that really a..."
"It's not going to survive long in the open air," Ratchet said grimly. "What are you thinking, bringing this here...? Do you think we have the facilities to care for this sort of thing?"
Inferno and Firestar exchanged a mortified glance. "You don't?" Inferno cried. "But..."
"Naturally! That's why we don't do this!" declared one of the junior researchers, indignant. "There's only one place to cultivate new sparks from Vector Sigma, and that's Cybertron! Are you two fresh off the assembly line or something?"
"We don't have anything for this here," Wheeljack told the parents bracingly, trying to offer the spark back. "I'm sorry, but there's no way you can ask us to..."
Firestar appeared on the verge of a coolant leak out of her optics. "You have to be able to do something! If the science block can't help us, who can?!"
Wheeljack's sidelights flickered dimly. He looked down at the spark, its glow guttering in some unfelt breeze. It had already been out in the elements for an inadvisably long time. If they didn't incubate it soon, its life would be over before it began...
His topical sensors detected Ratchet near his shoulder. He could tell, without looking, that the same unwelcomed pressure was slowly developing in his chestplate too. It was something the juniors would never be able to comprehend, those kids so blessed with a sterile detachment to functionality. They couldn't at all read the pain that he and Ratchet could read all over Inferno and Firestar's faces.
A first thought sparked in his formulation centres.
"I'll see what I can do," he said quietly.
They couldn't bid the unlucky parents to leave them in peace, so they shuffled them to a corner of the foyer and closed the door behind them. All over the workshop, lights flew on. Consoles were pulled out of hibernation, and the remaining student researchers that had somehow endured the ruckus before were roused out of stasis to start hauling equipment.
Wheeljack had had many years to prove himself as a robot among robots, whose indecipherable logic circuits may have taken the long way round to things but were inevitably right, if not always practical. This was not one of the practical times --by the source, no-- but it was functional. They found a tank of sufficient size and most of the right chemicals and terran analogs for the ones lacked and working together, eight students and two medics and Wheeljack were able to finally lower the tiny, shivering spark into the soup, and flipped the switch.
For the first centicycle nothing seemed to happen, and the spark floated in the thick of the pale, white-blue gelatin, its light almost extinguished. Then, slowly, almost unnoticeable except by Perceptor, the first chemical bonds began to form, and the elements began to cluster and separate, threading into complex netting and streaks of bright, silvery, shapeless substance at the centre of the tank.
It was majestic but uncomfortable. As Cybertron's scientific elite, they knew well what happened in the dark nurseries aggregated around the core of their mother planet, but none among them had understood it as more than theoretical diagrams, something clinical that was, in fact, anything but. This was the germination of a raw form.
Only Wheeljack and Ratchet were spared most shock, this not being the first protoform they had culled into existence. But it was certainly their first homebrew success. They rounded on Inferno and Firestar in the entryway.
"What in the name of Primus were you two thinking, interfacing your laser cores at a time like this?" Ratchet demanded. "We're in wartime! Do you have any idea how crippled our resources would be if everyone went off and decided to just manufacture their own derivatives?"
"Cycle down, Ratchet," Wheeljack urged. But, he added to the parents: "It's a completely uncertain thing you've set in motion here. These systems aren't at all optimal. The failure percentile is well over 70%. You gotta understand that."
They nodded fervently. But it didn't seem to penetrate the way Wheeljack wished it would.
"Listen," he said more firmly. "This ain't a weight off anybody's shoulders yet. Even if we can cull enough protoformatic substance to stabilise the spark, we don't got firmware or startup protocols for it, and we definitely don't got the right hardware. D'you know what this means?"
They struggled with this. He hated to do this to them-- he was sure their adrenal calibrators were shot as-is from having to cope with what they'd done in the first place, and now they were being warned about a future that, sensibly speaking, shouldn't exist.
"But... there's gotta be somethin'..."
Wheeljack's power supply sank. "The firmware and startups we could cook up, maybe. The rest, especially the system software? Not a chance."
Ratchet had been thinking about this already. "Maybe," he said. "But if we were able to install a learning matrix, the rest might sort itself out..."
"You're talking years of inducting principle protocols!"
"That's better than not inducting them at all?"
"Whaddya mean?" Inferno interrupted, a chill in his voice. "Y'mean he's gonna be... slow?"
"If he ain't slow, he's a paperweight," Wheeljack answered him frankly. "I told you, it was a stupid thing you kids did."
Inferno and Firestar were emotional wrecks by the time they left, facing pale and sickly sunrise and leaving Wheeljack and his students to their own devices to watch over the protoform. Wheeljack dismissed his researchers in short order, who promptly collapsed back in their respective recharger bays. With Perceptor and his aides also bidding a good night, that just left Wheeljack and Ratchet standing in the lab, looking up at the glorified decanter with its budding metal foetus.
It was an uncomfortable place to be. Ratchet rubbed the back of his neck.
"I need a drink."
They adjourned to Wheeljack's private compartments to address the matter. It had long been the two's custom to share living space while stationed together, initially out of requirement and lately out of preference. Ratchet didn't often see leave these days and the two's radically separate assignments made their meetings increasingly rare and valuable.
Wheeljack poured two drinks from a slim bottle of .80 proof A-grade energon, kept under his charger bay for nights like this, when things simply defied easy assessment. He downed his own quite quickly, but Ratchet took his time with his, nursing the drink as he stared at the opposite wall.
"Magnus should be duly informed," Ratchet said at length.
Wheeljack agreed. No arguments there.
"And Prime... let's not bother Prime unless it becomes an issue."
"You think it will?" Wheeljack asked, arms folded.
"You're the miracle-worker," Ratchet said, completely impassively.
Of the two of them, Ratchet had taken it harder, what had happened four megacycles ago. They had never really talked about it, and the war being the way it was, they probably never would.
"There's no sense devoting processing power to it tonight," Wheeljack determined, taking the at-last empty cup from Ratchet's grasp. "Let's recharge and see where everything stands in the morning."
Ratchet smiled mildly. "It is morning."
"Night is whenever I go to sleep," Wheeljack declared stubbornly. "And morning is whenever I wake up. Now how's about you taking a lie-down with me?"
Ultra Magnus came to see the protoform that afternoon. It was clear he wasn't happy about the situation, but no-one had much idea what ought to be done about it.
"Our troop shortage is no different than yesterday," Magnus sighed. "With that perspective..."
"He's not gonna be any sorta soldier, Magnus, I should warn you of that up-front," Wheeljack said flatly. "What we're workin' towards right now is basic operationality. No-one should get their hopes up."
But the protoform did indeed develop quite well, in excess of expectations. After the protoplasm separated and the core edges had defined itself, they moved it into a larger tank and embarked on the absurdly complex task of assembly, beginning with the motherboard. As expected, most components simply refused to bond, as they had no idea of its model. Infero and Firestar, while clearly intellectually of like design, were not in the least compatible in hardware, leaving Wheeljack and the others to trial and error to find parts that the body would accept. If not for Ratchet, with his seasoned knowledge of virtually all production lines, they might never have found the proper mix of core elements to bring the CPU online.
Once this was done, the next step was the chassis, and the elaborate frameworking that that entailed. In this area, Ratchet and Wheeljack were on much firmer footing, having put together quite a few soldiers in this fashion-- but the protoform still rejected most components, and without standard firmware, the entire team was in the dark about how to proceed. This guesswork stalled their other projects for a good decacycle, as the team experimented with every possible hybridisation ratio. The end result neither looked pretty nor functioned.
The important thing, though, was that with a proper casing, the protoform could now exist outside its tank, making their work from then on much easier. Wheeljack set his team to improving the schematics to the child's exoform while he and Perceptor embarked on coding the firmware.
Ratchet, the odd 'bot out, offered his assistance in the hardcoding, but Wheeljack urged him away.
"You're on leave! Enjoy it for once."
In truth, Wheeljack was worried the project was drawing out of the medic too many bad memories, and didn't want to see him in his lab just to be suffering the whole while. The unfortunate thing being that once Ratchet left, Wheeljack was alone with Perceptor, who had an unwelcomed curiosity at times.
"Forgive me, but I'm slightly confused, Wheeljack. Have you dealt with merged-spark manufactures before?"
"Using such a polite word for it. You must really hate them."
"Well, I'm opposed to them on principle," Perceptor said stiffly. "Surely it's a reasonable disposition to have, when things such as this are the end product."
"If we had Cybertron, it wouldn't be an issue at all," said Wheeljack, not looking up from the console. "The tanks there could take derivatives just the same as any other newborn."
"But problems would nevertheless be certain to arise, surely."
"Newborns are problems, in case you haven't noticed," Wheeljack groaned. "You make room for them. They don't make room for you."
Beside them, the infant chirruped.
Perceptor, to his credit, remembered himself. "Of course. After all, you've dealt with a lot of--"
"Not like this," Wheeljack said tersely. "None of them-- the Dinobots, the Protectobots-- were the least bit like this."
Well, the Protectobots at least. Those were on the level, with sparks from Vector Sigma. The Dinobots were a different story and one that Wheeljack could do without revisiting with someone who wasn't there to understand what circumstances were like at the time.
But Perceptor, damn him. He hit below the torso casing.
"But there was another-- wasn't there?"
Wheeljack's input module froze on a line of tier-three protocol.
"Yeah," he relented. "Yeah, there was."
In two decacycles, the infant was operating at an almost acceptable processing capacity, to the surprise of the entire R&D quarter. Ratchet approximated its intellect as nearing that of a prepubescent human, which by all accounts was quite remarkable. It was capable of fairly elaborate tasks and could respond coherently to questions and commands, although only in Cybertronix at the moment. Inferno and Firestar named him Pyro, and no-one was able to dissuade them.
Tensions relaxed throughout the science quarter. As Pyro's learning matrix picked up speed, his dependency on the lab decreased and he was able to aid in the construction of the cultivation quarter for short periods without hindering production. He still returned regularly for upgrades, as the team still devoted part of their cycles to further calculations on how best to improve his functionality. Soon his presence became as ubiquitous as one of Blaster's cassette tapes. Even Ultra Magnus seemed pleased with Pyro's progress.
And then, just as abruptly as the first incident, one night in a dead hour of predawn, a knock came at Wheeljack's door.
Inferno and Firestar stood under the lamplight, wringing their hands.
"Someone should neutralise that male's conductors," Ratchet muttered savagely, some time afterwards, as Wheeljack and he looked at the tiny spark in their hands.
Wheeljack's sidelights flickered in a sigh. "Let's wake the boys."
The second child was named Livewire, and like her older brother, she was a small and surprisingly successful miracle. Ultra Magnus regarded her as a headache, but gave the enterprise his blessing, if grudgingly. The R&D quarter were shocked at his audacity, as though he was the one up night and day nursing a wailing protoform.
She was as much a piece of guesswork as Pyro, and even fiestier to upgrade, so squirmy they had to pin her down to solder some of her components in place. She rejected four of their learning matrices before a compatible model was found, and not a single adrenal modulator seemed willing to attach to her. This led to a great deal of havoc the day she escaped the lab and into the construction zone, where ultimately Blurr proved the only 'bot able to catch her.
Wheeljack observed Ratchet's mood gradually worsening and wished he could do something about it, but knowing what the problem was didn't make it any easier to approach. Eventually, his disposition declined to a point where he ceased to live at the R&D quarter, preferring the medics' block in the next sector, where his cycles might more resemble his everyday work but at least didn't involve children.
A scant two decacycles into her uptime, a conflicting string of code in Livewire's command line invoked a fatal error on a routine refresh, and she collapsed in the middle of Wheeljack's work table. Panicked and finding his students worse than useless, Wheeljack contacted Ratchet and begged for his assistance.
Ratchet's line crackled bitingly, before he at length replied: "If this is your guilt talking..."
His guilt? They wanted to talk his guilt?! Where did Ratchet get off--!
"I can't do this alone," Wheeljack told him, and that was the plain truth of it.
"...Okay."
It was a slow-going procedure. They needed her online to have a look at the command shell but she couldn't endure an OS boot without a fatal error. Without a compatible substitution system they were forced to make a dummy programme, kept barely alive in a stasis tank while they opened up her hardcoding and inspected the command line string by string until they homed in on the bad code.
A single erroneous value. An easy mistake to make, the result of fatigue and sentient error. It wasn't as though any given Cybertronian had had much practise coding organ matrices from scratch.
The code corrected, Ratchet and Wheeljack hard-reset Livewire's system and reasserted the main OS. Her optics flickered to life, as burning bright as ever. She announced that she was hungry.
Ratchet sagged, but Wheeljack detected a nostalgic little smile, before he was able to compose himself.
Ratchet had just settled back into Wheeljack's compartments for the last stretch of his leave when yet another knock came at the front door.
"Um," was all Inferno managed to say.
"By the source," Ratchet hissed, furiously cooking the technetium base for the incubation tank. The new spark was bright orange and defiantly hot to the touch. "Do we need to release pamphlets?"
"Maybe if we write it jetstream up over the city..." Wheeljack hypothesised dimly, measuring out the bonding ratios. "Or send it over the logic-jamming frequencies from the comm tower..."
"I detect more than enough logic-jamming out of those two already," Ratchet muttered darkly.
The third was named Smokesignal, and they took exceptional care with his firmware, to see that previous incidents did not repeat themselves. By now the R&D team had detected patterns in the siblings' induction protocols and Wheeljack and Ratchet discovered it was all but second nature to find compatible hardware this time around. The usual accidents, mis-steps and insomniac maintenance surely followed, regardless, but by now the entire block were growing accustomed to this routine.
Furthermore, Wheeljack had noticed certain leitmotifs in the children's behavioural centres and an idea had slowly crept into his logic circuits, where it nested and began to infest the tertiary reasoning centres.
By the time Inferno and Firestar showed up on their doorstep with their fourth little "accident", Wheeljack merely suggested they keep going.
"I'm not sure I understand," said Ultra Magnus. The science collective strained not to point out this wasn't unusual, out of him.
Wheeljack did his best to explain. "They're a combiner team, you see. They're not the biggest, sure, but that comes down to their chassis. The protoforms came out diminutive, see, for a variety of reasons... But together, they're at least as tall as Jetfire!"
"But their mental centres are already stunted; I fail to see how they can compete mentally with even the slowest of Megatron's gestalts."
"Ah, well, we're working on that, but at the moment we're looking at installing a tier-one PUI shell with a six-step activation sequence in one of their networking modules, probably Firebrand's..."
"I'm sorry, which..?"
"He forms the head."
Magnus looked like his own head hurt quite a bit. "Fine," he said hastily. "But after that's accomplished I'm officially closing down this production line. Prime agrees it seems a great deal more trouble than it's due."
Perceptor cleared his vocal passages. "Begging your pardon, commander, but I can't say for certain we can shut the production line down, unless you know of some way to separate the manufacturers."
Ultra Magnus seemed resigned. It didn't appear that difficult of a request. "Their neighbours complain about the noise anyway," he said blandly.
The children were developing nicely. Picking out the name for their gestalt form was simple enough --Combustor, quite masculine-- although they were still having difficulty with the team name. 'The Firestarters' just didn't seem to send the right message, even if it was quite apt.
Smokesignal was the clear leader of the bunch, if only because he proved easiest to upgrade. By the end of a lunar month, he was functioning on an intellectual capacity at least comparable to a late-adolescent human, with backboard processes well in excess of a matured adult. You could almost trust him to do things.
Wheeljack hadn't felt this pleased with his work since he'd made the Dinobots. Granted, that pleasure was short-lived, but that moment of elation, exchanging happy glances with Ratchet as their first collaborative creations came online, had been one for the longterm datatrax-- and this occasion certainly ranked close to that.
There was something to treasure in their conception of the Dinobots, as uncomfortable as the memory was in a lot of ways. It was perhaps more conventional than Inferno and Firestar's method, but no more orthodox. Grimlock's spark alone had nearly cost Wheeljack his life. He and Ratchet had learned the hard way that attempting to split a spark with chisel and hammer was among the stupidest possible things for a 'bot to do.
And yet, they did it, despite the trauma to Wheeljack's system, not to mention to Ratchet's psyche for having to deal it. And at the end of it all, they had at their disposal five chips of Wheeljack's core to power their new creations. Thinking, foolishly, that between spark and machinery their children would have enough to go on. How long did they spend repairing the Ark after that day?
The experience should have been enough to scar them, but oddly it didn't. The pain had drawn them into a strange intimacy, and every subsequent interaction a curious reinforcement of that bond. At the time it was beneficial, the Autobots' ranks as they were, and certainly the nature of the attachment went unquestioned. But as with all things, it ultimately undermined them.
Livewire was the stubbornest of the Firestarters, and also the most fearless. She took one look at Sunstreaker as he passed her in the communications quarter and stood in his path until he was forced to return the gaze.
"...What do you want, runt?"
"Why d'they call y'guys twins?" she asked him and his brother.
Sunstreaker and Sideswipe exchanged smirks. Sunstreaker bent forward to grin in the small fembot's face.
"Cuz I'm so awesome, they had to make two of me!"
Sideswipe snickered. Livewire frowned. She didn't enjoy sarcasm, especially in response to questions she'd taken so much trouble to ask.
She set off an electrical fire in Sunstreaker's nose, and he had to be rushed to the medbay after that. No-one ever caught her.
Hearing the story from Sideswipe half a milicycle later, Ratchet was torn. On the one hand, this was horrible, and certainly not the message he wished Wheeljack's new combiner team to send to their elders. On the other, it was so funny.
Sunstreaker was less than pleased by Ratchet's good humour. Despite the damage to his frontal receptor units, including his optics, he snarled up at the medic: "That's just what I'd expect out of a slaggin', meat-creature emulatin' circuit traitor!"
It was violent language like Ratchet had never heard even out of even the foulest-mouthed battle casualties. Even Sideswipe seemed shocked.
"Hey, there's no call for that," he told his twin sternly. "If you'd just given that kid a straight answer--"
"Shyeah, who'd give a straight answer to a derivative like that? Does nobody have any shame left anymore?" he demanded of Ratchet. And from the tone it was obvious Sunstreaker was applying that question directly to him.
Ratchet found his best reply to be simply to smile and resume with his work.
Ratchet heard Sideswipe call his name as he left the clinic that evening. His better judgement told him to keep walking, but like as not, that wasn't his style.
He stopped and waited patiently for Sideswipe to catch up to him, as flustered as he was earlier. Sideswipe launched into a stammer: "Look, ignore that exhaust fan, he doesn't know what he's talking about..."
"Since your clearance is no higher than his, I can't imagine you do either," Ratchet reminded him briskly.
"Well-- no, but--" Sideswipe grappled for the right words. "It isn't like-- it's not that-- Nobody thinks about you like that. Really, they don't."
At which point, Ratchet evaluated it really was prudent to turn around and keep walking.
"Hey, wait--!"
"It's not you," the medic said lightly. "It's just that it's my last day of leave. I'd rather not get into it."
'Slaggin', meat-creature emulatin' circuit traitor!'
And Sunstreaker said this to him. Ratchet would love to know what his reaction to Inferno and his mate would be, with or without a melted nose to get his hackles up.
"It's idiotic," Wheeljack said simply, picking up the debris on another failed experiment with the machine he'd tentatively dubbed a compression-compressor. Ratchet couldn't see this one entering standard use very quickly. "Why make input and output models if not for cross-machine manufacture? Just because that upstart ain't seen it get a lot of play in wartime..."
"I'm not an input model," Ratchet felt the need to remind.
"Well, that's what universal adapters are for!"
"...You invented the universal adapter."
"It's filling a niche, is all I'm saying!" Wheeljack chucked the last of the shrapnel in his scratch bin. He didn't believe in discarding things.
A buzz came at the front door intercom. Ratchet rose to answer, but Wheeljack waved him back down.
"Nuh-uh, Nurse Ratchet. It's straight back to Moon Base One with you in the morning; you're not moving a tertiary hydraulic without my say-so in the mean time."
It was with sizable exasperation but not necessarily surprise that the inventor found Inferno at his doorstep, albeit for the first time unaccompanied. Firestar had disembarked for the Asian territories late last night, to the relief of several officials. Her mate, on the other hand, was so miserable that he'd let his coolant regulators go, pale liquid streaming from the corners of his pathetic optics.
"Aw, she's gone, Wheeljack! I dunno what to do anymore!"
"There's always Red Alert," Wheeljack suggested dryly.
"Well, shucks, sure, I guess, but if y'ask me he's just gonna traumatise the poor kid!"
"...'Kid'," Wheeljack repeated, clearly hating where this was going.
Inferno drew his hand out from behind his back awkwardly.
In all his uptime, Ratchet had seldom heard Wheeljack so annoyed.
"Inferno."
"Look, I know what yer sayin'--"
"Inferno, Combustor already has six components. What in the name of Primus do you expect us to do with this?"
"Uh, er, I. Uh. He could be an alternate?"
Ratchet sank back on Wheeljack's workbench and covered his optics with a hand.
This spark flickered with a light even dimmer than his siblings. He'd been out in the air too long, and the protoplasm struggled to congeal around him in the tank. After several tense decicycles watching and waiting for the spark's status to improve, Ratchet and Wheeljack were forced to give up their vigil in the interest of their power cells. They retired to Wheeljack's private compartments ill at ease.
Wheeljack's flask of .80 proof was quite a bit lower than it had been prior to Ratchet's arrival, but that didn't really matter this late into the night. He passed Ratchet his familiar cup and poured a dose of his own, and joined him by the window to stare blankly at the distant moon.
There was nothing to be said between them, not when in all likelihood they'd reactivate in the morning to a death in their labs. And with Ratchet haunted by still older ghosts, there wasn't much room for banter. But then, they had found fewer and fewer things to talk about, as the megacycles had worn on.
In some ways, Wheeljack missed the old days, cramped in the corner of a sideways spacecraft, the weight of the war on a dozen unlucky sets of shoulders. Where it was them alone against the widening mouth of hell. You knew where you stood when it was against absolutely everything.
In those days, they didn't need words. These days, they just couldn't bear to utter them.
They drained the bottle before they knew what they were doing, and it did nothing for their moods. They lifted stinging optics to follow the arc of the moon past the faint band of stars the humans called the Milky Way, somewhere in which, far away, were the furnaces that had once given them life.
Who could have imagined the progression their uptimes would take, to such distant places and with such miserable experiences to their names? Could they have at all foreseen the ugly scars they'd someday carve on their cores? Could they have at all justified to their younger selves their actions, the way they'd struggled to rationalise them after the fact?
It was a very easy and natural thing, the way Wheeljack and Ratchet found themselves opening to each other. It was like returning to an old familiar altmode, or slipping into a warm pool of electrum. They let it wash over them, thoughtless, adapters fitting easily into worn, old receptor jacks. They laid down as one on Wheeljack's recharger bay, letting the first, light currents run through them and take them down into it.
Wordlessly, their optics the only things glowing in the dark, Ratchet urged Wheeljack onto his back and climbed over him, legs straddling his waist, mouth opening without a noise as Wheeljack's signal pushed further past his tier-one firewalls.
The further the signal weaved through his power centres, the surer Ratchet seemed of Wheeljack's intent, but he raised no objection. His optics merely flickered and he tilted his head back.
In all their uptime, the circumstances that had led them to know the deepest part of each other had always been unfortunate and full of pain. First with Wheeljack's wilful mutilation to bring the Dinobots into the world, and then the child, the one torn from them so violently the moment she was born.
No, Ratchet had reason enough to think of himself as damaged goods. But still Wheeljack wanted to know that part of him, to trace its edges, to feel its energy pulsing against his own.
His hands clenched on Ratchet's thighs, it didn't take long at all for their frames to shake, for the cables wired between their chests to shudder steaming-hot with a powerful, if almost fatal current. Wheeljack's interface protocols licked along that innermost fire and Ratchet shivered, little shocks of overload hitting his circuitry with every light nudge.
"--Don't--" he pleaded, as Wheeljack's pace increased.
"I'll pull out," Wheeljack promised thickly, the feedback in his own core rattling him close to meltdown. "Just let me--"
Ratchet's fingers gripped his shoulders. A fearful protest rose in his voicebox, but it came out choked, the gears and wirings locking up in his throat as they both teetered on the edge of something that they had never--
Wheeljack's optics blacked out as he withdrew, desperately locking his interface shell to the nearest nonfatal port and releasing the entire circuit feed into its depths. Their frames convulsed in near-synchronity as the last rush overtook them and every last ulterior process crashed, hard and loud in the blank night air.
In the aftermath, fans keening, their bodies slumped together on the recharger bay, they felt the bitterness rise up in their compressors: a rush of awful memory and ramifications and lost chances and cancelled futures.
Ratchet lost control of the fluid ducts in his face plating and his optics leaked openly, the way Inferno's had done. He was broken past modesty now. No possible recovery but to wait it out in silence, his open and shaking casing curled up on its side on the corner of the recharger bed.
Tentatively, Wheeljack reached out to him. Ratchet lashed back violently, shoving him with all his strength onto the floor. Wheeljack remained there in a heap, accepting, staring at his hands.
Who could blame Ratchet for his self-hatred? Who could blame him for being jealous, seeing those two young upstarts breeding like humans without thought or concern for consequence, and getting away with it? Six of seven in a lunar month to survive, and he and Wheeljack had waited for megacycles, had yearned so patiently for that 'maybe someday'... Only to have it torn from them by force...
Wheeljack had never known anything so cruel. He had seen beloved creations crumble into dust in his hands, he had seen comrades die well before their time, and by Primus, he had seen and known suffering-- but the child had been something else. They had been forced to stand by, helpless, as she was taken from them. They had been made to help. If they'd only been threatened with their own lives, they'd've gladly let themselves be cut down, but instead they'd been threatened with each other's. And that was what had undone them, and those that forced them knew that.
She would be a little older than Daniel now, if she was still alive.
Even the circumstances being what they had been, they had done all they could to preserve her. They had fought so hard for her little life. What parents wouldn't?
Wheeljack's sidelights emitted a low glow with the memory, recalling the details of that overlong nightmare. No wonder he and Ratchet had responded so readily to Inferno and Firestar's little emergency. The situation had been so similar...
As things happened with his .80 proof-addled logic circuits, a strange thought surfaced in his CLI shell. He recalled the readouts on that diminuitive little spark's tank.
Ratchet looked over his shoulder as Wheeljack climbed to his feet. He asked the obvious question, vocal circuits hoarse, but got no answer for his trouble. Wheeljack continued silently out the door into the main lab.
Ratchet followed, at least as far as the doorway. He watched in silence as Wheeljack approached the incubation tank in a half sprint, overtaken by something, a strange intuition.
The sickly spark twinkled on the verge of death in its protoplasm, faint streaks of transmetal failing to thread together around its centre. As he watched, Wheeljack pulled a neglected receptacle off a back shelf and rummaged through its contents, finding an ore that his team had before dismissed out of hand as too unstable a compound.
Wheeljack set to work on it, slicing it finely with the narrowest blade to hand. This done, he scooped the shavings into a tray and ground them to powder, but not too thin-- not too thin, or it wouldn't bond--
The result was instantaneous. The moment he introduced the new compound into the tank, the stage-one reactions initiated, chemical bonding thinning the solution and separating rapidly into component stasis gel and protoformatic metal. At the centre of the tube, the spark shook brightly, as with new oxygen fed to its flame.
Wheeljack looked around at Ratchet, still withdrawn near the doorway. His chestplate still open and his face raw.
Sometimes, it was better to say things than leave them unsaid.
"It wasn't your fault," Wheeljack told him.
Ratchet's mouth parted, but no sound came out.
Four megacycles they'd spent not talking about it. And suddenly there it was, bare and naked as though laid out on Wheeljack's workbench.
"It wasn't your fault," the inventor repeated. "You're not broken."
And the night finished uninterrupted.
Inferno was overjoyed to hear that his son had survived the night. When he came to collect Ratchet for his flight in the morning, he wrapped Wheeljack up into a massive bear hug, slobbering and stammering thank-yous into his shoulder plating.
"Aw, fella, everythin' you've done fer me and mine...! I owe ya everythin'!"
"Can't take credit for one mote of it," Wheeljack said mildly. "You can thank Ratchet here for the inspiration."
Ratchet, if he was still feeling suboptimal after the night's recharge, didn't betray it. He took Inferno's soppy wet hugs in stride.
"I'm in such debt to you fellas. Maybe, maybe I should name this one after y'all..."
"Oh, please, no," Wheeljack answered immediately, panic momentarily overtaking him. "Think of our, ehr, modesty..."
Wheeljack certainly had more than enough to attend to at the lab but he insisted on accompanying Ratchet and Inferno to the port, where Ratchet's shuttle was fueling up for its flight back to Moon Base 1. It was a silent walk, or as silent as it could be with Inferno filling the awkwardly empty air with his own contributions. They didn't pay attention.
They hadn't exactly exchanged words since the night before in the lab, and with Ratchet's departure marking perhaps the last visit for several megacycles to come, anything and everything threatened to boil to the surface. And yet, nothing did. There was nothing he could quite bring himself to say.
If they could turn time back a few decacycles, and go back to taking things for granted, would this be easier? If they could just undo that incident of four megacycles ago, and go back to that eternal hypothetical 'maybe', would it be a warmer parting?
But that was the hard lesson Inferno and Firestar had had to grapple with too, these past few decacycles: the deed was done, and life still moved forward, with however many tagalongs at your ankles.
"Hazard. I'll name 'im Hazard."
"Huh?" said Wheeljack, drawn out of his thoughts.
"The li'l beastie. It's the name Red picked out," Inferno rambled on, despairing. "He's set his mind ta raisin' 'im no matter what I say about it."
Wheeljack smirked with his optics.
"Smart name," said Ratchet, collecting the case with his personal effects. "Somehow I don't think it'll keep him out of trouble, though."
"Naw, can't imagine it will," Inferno agreed, a little reluctantly.
Couldn't be. Was the burden of progeny finally enough to do what years of Red Alert's needling had failed to manage? Had this impulsive kid finally come to consider that, maybe, there were lives worth watching out for?
Wheeljack turned his head to confirm his suspicions with Ratchet, but Ratchet had vanished. The inventor whipped around frantically, to discover, almost too late, that Ratchet was already up the stairs into the shuttle.
Something else took over. He raced after him.
Better to say something, than nothing at all.
"Look!" he called up the steps to Ratchet, after calling his name. "If we got a new lead-- If I learned anything at all--"
Ratchet looked around him. There was no escaping making this a very public conversation. But once it was open, it was open.
"--I'll send word to you," Wheeljack finished. "We'll do it together. Finish it, if we have to."
There were times when Ratchet's expression was unreadable. This was one of them. They held each other's gaze, a razor-thin connection cut out of space and time.
"--Roger that," said Ratchet.
He didn't smile. But he seemed at peace.
end