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?
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One of the only people to visit Wheeljack's workshop of their own volition was the Autobot medic Ratchet. This was generally only when he was escaping somewhere, though.
The thing was, small incidents to other Autobots could mean enormous crises for Ratchet. Not so unusual when one's very function was to fix what others broke, but there were certain extremes that no-one else on the crew seemed capable of taking into consideration.
For a very specific example: in their respective logs, Optimus Prime's entry for the day might simply have read "Grimlock stubbed his toe", but Ratchet's entry consisted of dramatically more cursing. Five decicycles spent subduing an injured Dinobot did not tend to do good things for his coolant pressure.
So he was in Wheeljack's workshop, bristling like one of those furry quadrupeds that humans kept, and ready to choke a bitch, as Jazz might put it.
But as it was said around the base: Ratchet fixed everyone, and Wheeljack fixed Ratchet. Seeing the look in his optics, Wheeljack dropped what he was doing (not literally, because that might doom all civilisation on Earth) and beckoned Ratchet over to his workbench.
Even among the generally very affectionate crew, Ratchet and Wheeljack were understood to have a uniquely solid relationship, as pronounced if not moreso than the bond between Prime and Ironhide. There were obvious reasons for this, of course, but the way it had come to manifest was perhaps slightly stranger and harder to justify than some others. Especially when so much went beyond easy articulation.
"Petrol for your thoughts?" Wheeljack prompted carefully, when Ratchet was seated on the edge of the table. He dug around the junk crowding his work area until he found his tune-up kit.
Ratchet had a full tank's worth of thoughts, as it turned out. Cliffjumper and his shoulder sockets. Bumblebee and his voice modulator. Prime and his chestplate, always his chestplate, you think he could think of a better place to store the Matrix than behind two panels of glass. And of course, Grimlock. Grimlock.
"Do you have any idea," Ratchet said moodily, "how hard it is to solder the foot plating on a Tyrannosaurus rex?"
Wheeljack, who had been listening dutifully to all this, gave it a moment's consideration. "About as hard as keeping the privates from using your particle accelerator for laser tag?" he suggested.
Like a hanging process finally clearing a resource hurdle, Ratchet's expression at last broke into a rare smile.
"Are you recharging tonight?" he asked, voice finally lightening.
"Nope."
"Could I... come by?"
Wheeljack glanced up at the doorway. "You could stick around right now if you like," he suggested, dimming his sidelights. Just a little. "I've got something I'd like for you to test."
This was never a good thing to hear out of Wheeljack, not for Ratchet or for anyone else. The medic's frame started to tighten up again. "Oh, Primus, Wheeljack, you know I'm not in the mood for any sort of..."
Wheeljack had his sonic driver out and loosening Ratchet's shoulder plating before he got another word in. "Relax! Relax! It's harmless as a protoform, I swear it."
"I'm not really interested."
Wheeljack persevered. Unlike the early days, such words weren't necessarily the timestamp of death. He pressed his thumbs against that especially sensitive spot along Ratchet's backstruts and delivered a brief jolt of current.
Ratchet let out a small noise, that he was immediately embarrassed by.
"Come on," Wheeljack prodded.
"No."
"Come on. It'll help you key down. I promise."
After some badgering, Wheeljack relented just what "it" was-- a modified DDOS application, fitted to a peripheral about the size of a wrench. Chip had given him the starting idea, after talking about arguments he'd gotten into on something called Usenet, and somehow he'd used this as a shell programme to settle the debate. Which seemed silly, but Wheeljack wasn't about to criticise.
What the peripheral actually did was even simpler, though: it pinged, and kept pinging. The universal port interface meant virtually any receptor along a 'bot's chassis could hook up with it, although Wheeljack had an intuition it worked best on pain sensors.
Oh, and it had speed controls.
Ratchet gaped at it.
"No," he said.
"But."
"No."
"Imagine the great uses in combating joint stiffness!"
"That isn't what you designed it for and you know it!"
Wheeljack began to reply, but his early warning sensors alerted him to something close by. He immediately left the massager on his workbench and went to lock the door.
"Look," said the scientist, as whosever footsteps they were receded down the hall. "I won't force you into nothing. But you're not going out without me taking a look at your system processes, at least. And" --he felt completely factory-fresh saying this, but-- "I'd like it if we could interface. You know. Just for a short while."
Ratchet smirked, disarmed. He didn't know where Wheeljack got off acting so chaste when he had more corrupted baseline code than any 'bot he'd ever met.
He leapt off the edge of the table and joined Wheeljack by the door.
"I added you to my first-tier permissions a long time ago," he reminded him softly.
"Heh! You're such a romantic."
Although his casing opened easily, Ratchet's wiring still had to be approached with care. It had as much to do with his self-preservation modules in his logic centres as anything else: his monitoring systems had a hard time accepting any interface as welcomed contact, no matter what the permissions. That, and he had never sat well with invasive procedure.
But Wheeljack was the kind of robot who could easily spend four cycles straight hacking the most recalcitrant mainframe. It sent his circuits sparking almost as much to see the breaking down as witness the coming together.
He carried through his work with precision, jacking in via the chassis wiring and creeping his signal slowly across the topical networks. He met resistance at the arterial hubs, difficult conductors buckling down into autolock. From stress, knowing Ratchet. He sent a low current through the channel to jolt them open, generating a small gasp, and a quiet moan.
A few more kinks in his piping and Wheeljack might've taken this opportunity to undo some of the couplings and disable the medic's arms. But those were for times slightly more after nightfall and when Ratchet wasn't wound tight as a copper heatsink. As it was, Wheeljack took the time to be thorough and forded through every last node in the ends of Ratchet's fingertips before withdrawing, the 'bot sinking easy and pliant on Wheeljack's repairbed.
He lay down next to him and slid open their chest panels, gently so that Ratchet wouldn't be taken by surprise. With the hand closest to his workbench, Wheeljack sought out the right bit of cable that would do the job of modding what they didn't actually have for themselves, neither being a receptor model in any capacity. It still proved a tight fit hooking in, and the cable being as short as it was, demanded they lay pressed together, clocks and counterweights ticking against each other's casing.
If someone came in now, they'd have absolutely no explanation for this. At least not a decent one.
"Wheeljack," Ratchet murmured, before the first surge. "Are you sure you locked the..."
"And it's soundproof and blastproof," Wheeljack said, anticipating him. He added at a lower octave, "I could overclock your quad-cores so hard it'd melt your serial ports and no-one would hear us."
His topical sensors detected a minute tremble from Ratchet's casing. "--You wouldn't really--"
"Naw. Not while we don't have any spares around, anyway."
Ratchet made a face and started to retort, but Wheeljack took that moment to send a first pulse over the cable, neatly halting the medic's vocal processes in his throat.
"--!!"
Wheeljack kept at it, diligently. After the first few waves, the feedback began seeping back through, and Ratchet strained and moaned and grasped Wheeljack's shoulders desperately. The excess current raced through Wheeljack's frame to all kind of sectors he couldn't have anticipated, the spine of his chassis shivering fore to aft with every surge.
The way the electricity moved, it was impossible for their compressors to catch and absorb, instead just refeeding it through their systems. An endless circuit of building intensity, as more and more quadrants from their power supplies became tributaries with each pass, and Ratchet's firewalls came down one by one.
The expression on his faceplate was priceless. Unbeatable. A rush of reward endorphins so intense it almost tripped the pain sensors.
Ratchet's awareness centres almost fell offline. He held on, barely: response messages addled his circuitry such that his consciousness was all but lost in the deluge. The heat was almost too much for his coolant system to bear, and kept rising, past all nominal temperature gauges. It was-- it was--
And then he detected it. The pinging rattling his aft conductors. His awareness modules in such a fugue, he hadn't even noticed Wheeljack reaching over to his table and pulling over that accursed "massager". Now Wheeljack had it hooked straight into his gearbox, right up in his--!
"--You--!"
Wheeljack cranked the DDOS relay straight up to max and suggested that Ratchet might want to hold on.
The DOS attack overwhelmed Ratchet's nerve kernel almost instantly. His body arched clear off the medbay bed and collapsed, head thrown back, hydraulics tight inside his neck until they threatened to wrench apart. Overrun compressor systems threw an entire adrenal gauge of energon through his cabling system and flooded his casing, every conductor shrieking with excess sensation. And they weren't the only things shrieking.
It was Ratchet's strangled voice or the intense rush of feedback or even the residual ping responses, but suddenly Wheeljack was over the edge too. His auxiliary processes cancelled one after another in succession, endorphin relays coiling faster and faster in an increasingly narrow circuit. When Ratchet's auto-protect failsafe on his CPU clamped down on their I/O connection, the rush of energy threw itself hard into his circuitry, so hard and powerful even his transformation matrices were shocked into reset.
In the wake of the surge, Wheeljack braced himself on his hands over the medic and admired his weary and listless frame, on the brink of outtage and every wire shivering in the aftershocks. Ratchet convulsed and twitched, pain receptors coming back online now after their brief reprioritising. Wheeljack remembered himself belatedly and turned off the DDOS machine, and ever so gently started to disengage.
While it pleased him to think he was that good of a hacker that he'd left Ratchet completely without words, it did surprise Wheeljack that the 'bot was this exhausted. Before disconnecting the last I/O pins, he read Ratchet's fuel gauges and sighed.
"Lugnut," was the last thing Ratchet heard Wheeljack say, before he fell into standby. "You did need a recharge."
It was a decicycle or two later that Ratchet stirred, fuel injectors firmly secured to his backstruts. Wheeljack seemed to have moved him to his backup recharger bay while he was offline.
His charge was still too meager to afford much movement but he detected Wheeljack's voice at the edge of hearing, speaking sternly to someone at the door.
"Ratchet is taking some necessary downtime. Come back later."
Bumblebee. "But Huffer's dented the rear of his chassis and little bits stick out in his altmode and Prowl's been having problems with his kibble and Grimlock--"
"You hear yourself properly, little buddy?" Wheeljack said, cutting him off. "You're soldiers. Lay off the guy. He ain't some medbot for you guys to run into the ground."
"We know that!"
"My advice would be to start knowing it a bit more emphatically. You fellas push him too hard. And now he's taking some well-earned standby. Capische?"
It was a useless expenditure, but Ratchet smiled to himself. He laid his head back down and switched his optics off to save power.
It was a decicycle more until Ratchet's still-hypersensitive topical sensors tore him from stasis again, detecting Wheeljack hovering nearby. The medic keyed his optics back on at low power to get a look at him, knelt at the edge of the recharger bay, blank optics peaceful with his head in his arms.
His cells much better charged now, Ratchet reached out a hand to graze the other 'bot's forearm. Wheeljack stirred, sidelights blinking.
"Come up here," said Ratchet.
"Nah," Wheeljack said muzzily. "My charge is fine. I just got bored."
"Come up anyway."
He did, although it was cramped. Ratchet leaned on one shoulder to give Wheeljack more space, but the cables in his back didn't have much more give than that.
"I been thinking," Wheeljack began, gears so clearly turning behind his optics it was comical. "I think I wanna make a derivative system with you."
There was a beat where the statement hung in space, like a heat-seeking missile determining its target. Then it hit and Ratchet was forced to look away, logic circuits grinding painfully in his chest.
"Think about it some more," he told Wheeljack. "Where do you think we have space to incubate something like that?"
"We'll build a place for her in my workshop! Think of it, Ratchet: a journeyman Autobot, part medic and part mechanic. She can spot us both and increase our productivity eight hundred perce--"
"No." Ratchet paused, and then his optics flared open wide. "'She'? You've decided a gender?"
Wheeljack had the audacity to look bashful. "But females come with all these neat peripherals..."
Ratchet nearly shot clear out of the bed. In sub for that, he shoved Wheeljack onto the floor.
His logic centres were overheating. This didn't usually occur, but something in the self-support wiring was completely outraging him.
"You dirty old corrupt OS!"
"I didn't mean it like that!"
"Yes you did! That's our daughter you're talking about!"
"Hypothetical daughter!"
"Yes, hypothetical! THAT MAKES IT WORSE!"
Ratchet would have liked to yell a bit more, but it was then that their auditory receptors picked up something quite similar to shelling outside the entrance to the base. And in the next moment, a sound not unakin to Grimlock yowling like a human newborn.
Ratchet sank back down, his low power still hindering his movements. He sighed.
"Besides," he told Wheeljack. "We have enough children."
end
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