by K.A. Rose
Transformers and related material copyright and trademark Hasbro. Iron Man, Avengers and related material copyright and trademark Marvel Comics, Marvel Studios, et cetera. Used without permission for nonprofit fan appreciation.This story uses the IDW Transformers continuity up to the end of "Escalation" and select materials after/outside of that. I'm also using the movie 'verse for Iron Man. The Avengers material is pre-Civil War. I use the New Avengers/Transformers 4-part miniseries by IDW Publishing as a point of connection, but it's not necessary to have read this to understand the story.
This story is not intended for children. It contains violence, strong language and explicit sexual situations.
Pairings for the curious (highlight to read): Wheeljack/Ratchet, Tony Stark/Ratchet, Wheeljack/Pepper, Stark/Pepper, Prowl/Sunstreaker, Sunstreaker/Hunter, Sideswipe/Bumblebee, Ultra Magnus/Prowl, Thundercracker/Fireflight, Stark/Magnus, Stark/Thundercracker... geez, Tony gets around.
Story warnings (highlight to read): Plug-n-play (wire-based) sex between robots. Hetero- and homosexual situations between humans and between humans and hard-light holograms. Mate-swapping. Dubious consent. Sexual contact between robots, one of which may or may not be acceptably "of age". Psychic threesome. Mention (non-explicit) of Transformer reproduction.
This story uses time units not found elsewhere in Transformers canon. Please refer to the Appendix for notes on usage. (Quick reference: 1 cycle = 1 day. Greek prefixes are identical to how they are used in metric measurement.)
That's all! Happy reading!
"Ow, ow, ow, ow.""Hold still, please."
After the Symkaria-Latveria Incident, it had been the intention of Prime and his crew to slip below human radar again. The Avengers spelled trouble --inordinate amounts of it, as humans went-- and aggravating the relationship any further would have been, well, ill-advised.
Of course, then there was The Little Situation Involving Ramjet Over The English Channel, and there was little use for pretense anymore. The Autobots and Avengers were saddled with each other. For better or worse.
"I am holding still! You're the one tugging my arm off!"
"Hm, it seems to have fused with the dermis in a few places. Sorry, but this is going to hurt..."
"AAGHSTOPSTOPSTOP--"
At first, everyone was cautiously optimistic about the affair. Here, after all, were the closest things the Earth had to natural defences. And because they played the game themselves, they weren't inclined to give it away to others. This was a small comfort. And they weren't so bad, on an interpersonal level. The Captain America one and Prime had a respectable, professional relationship. Jazz was chummy with the arachnoid one, but then, Jazz managed to be chummy with everything.
Even so, the charm quickly wore off. They were still humans, when it came right down to it: no matter how comparatively superior they happened to be to their brethren, they had organic outlooks, organic needs, and organic idiosyncrasies. They were not on the fast track to first-tier understanding. Ratchet would not have trusted the best of them with a flank compartment access sequence, and he considered himself one of the more open-minded on Prime's crew.
But then came Stark.
"You see? That wasn't so bad."
"'Not so bad'! Right, give me that knife, I'm cutting this shit off myself."
"Ah, I think your arm really will come off if you try to lift this, Tony..."
After initial introductions in Latveria, the Autobots had found themselves incapable of addressing him as Iron Man. It was a matter of simple inaccuracy. On the other hand, Stark sounded like the name you might give a pet, and he was aptly sized for that role.
But what impressed Prime's crew best was his power source. A human with a spark-- everyone thought it was adorable. Only very young Cybertronians tended to house their sparks close to the surface of their casing. Out on a distant front like Earth, the Autobots were reminded just how long it had been since they'd seen a youth. Stark's presence was, therefore, very nostalgic for the crew.
Of course, as an analog for a sparkling, Stark was almost overpoweringly precocious. He latched onto Wheeljack almost instantly, zipping around his workshop like an insecticon, eager to take notes on everything in his path. He had plenty of questions for Ratchet as well: how did their hydraulics work, what was their cabling like, did they feel pain, did they need to rest regularly? Their species' existence, by itself, didn't seem to fascinate him --the Avengers were used to extraterrestrials, and Stark in particular had apparently received intel on machine races long before their face-to-face encounter-- but he seemed poised to assimilate as much of their tech into his own as possible. He insisted that it wasn't unfairly advancing the human race if it was just for his own benefit.
For a time, Optimus smiled (or, well, you know) on this endeavour, but the crew soon felt they had to intervene. Stark was, perhaps, too smart for a human. And even though he appeared largely autonomous from the group, who knew when the Avengers' organic sensibilities would become a liability?
Or such was the official story. Ratchet couldn't help noticing that his comrades' attitudes had changed roughly around the time Stark had begun asking questions about coupling, and not before.
"Hold on, I can get that piece myself!"
"Tony, please don't make me get the tranquilisers."
Now, Ratchet agreed completely that Stark hadn't been the most tactful in how he broached the subject. But no creature can entirely anticipate another species' taboos. The medic recalled some of the verbal sting felt when he had inquired --rather innocently, he felt-- when Verity and Jimmy were going to begin cleaning each other, and that was a rather benign suggestion compared to what they might get up to in an unmonitored, enclosed space. And anyway, as Ratchet understood it, humans were very enthusiastic couplers. A survey of their global internetwork indicated some of them even interfaced with other species and inanimate objects, so Stark's question was actually quite sensible.
"Oh, slag. You're bleeding again."
"Don't say that like it's my fault--!"
"Look at this, you're bleeding all over the table..."
Anyway, that was all ten cycles ago, before something else had come up to occupy both organic and mechanical attention. One averted nuclear holocaust later, Tony Stark lay writhing on Ratchet's work table, bleeding heavily and with several more strips of melted armour yet to peel off his flesh.
Ratchet put his cutter down and went to grab some medigel. Unlike many of his companions, Stark did not come equipped with automated tissue regeneration, but humans were not the first carbon-based organics Autobot medics had been made to deal with.
Stark calmed his struggling as Ratchet's holomatter hands applied medigel over the torn sections of skin along his calf. Good, Ratchet thought. Most likely, the minor anaesthetic administered before had been insufficient for their purposes. He wished he'd caught on sooner, but every human handled chemicals differently-- or in Stark's case, hardly at all.
Ratchet had his holomatter mop up some of the blood pooled around the body while the anaesthetic took effect. It was difficult to look directly at him. Along with the rest of the Autobots, Ratchet felt most at home with Stark when he was in his shell, and seeing him without was like looking at a naked protoform. Well, there was no helping it now, as the only remaining parts to Stark's shell were the flakes of metal Ratchet was busily lasering off along with the top few layers of his skin. About the bleeding, there was only so much he could do with simple compression.
He resumed his work, delicately. It was so unfortunate, that something like this should happen to such an admittedly ingenious bit of human technology. Stark seemed to be taking the loss rather well.
"I take it you can make another of these," said Ratchet, successfully getting the last piece of breastplate off without too much nipple. He wondered why the males came equipped with these anyway.
"Of course. I've got some spares at home," stark grunted. He lurched off the table slightly as a piece wedged between his ribs came free, and hissed out a few human curses.
"Maybe it'd be best if you went under for a while," Ratchet advised delicately. His holomatter avatar rushed to get a patch over the gash in the human's side.
"Biostats still within acceptable limits. I'm fine. You're not gonna kill me."
Ratchet recalled some of the other medical emergencies humans had posed while in his care, and was not altogether convinced.
"I'm not the best qualified for this, you know," he reminded him again.
"No, Cap's right, I can't be flown to DC like this," Stark said, eyes clamped shut. "Just get the suit off and some temp stitches on and they can move me in the morning."
Ratchet frowned. An organic would have a better idea of his own systems than even a medibot, but Ratchet had also known humans to downplay their injuries. And Stark was just the type to do that sort of thing.
"Surely there's some local facility..."
"I'm public, but I'm not that public, Ratch'. Your average human surgeon wouldn't know what to do with any of this. Hey. Just..." His hand sought out and gripped Ratchet's holomatter by the wrist. "...Just keep doing what we were before. It was fun."
"Not the word I would use."
"You're not the first doctor to see me all shredded to pieces. I usually do a lot more whining."
"Okay. That's comforting." Ratchet surveyed the work yet ahead of him. There wasn't much, but it was the pieces he had worried about removing. "Do these regrow?" he asked, his holomatter pointing to indicate a particular spot.
Stark struggled to lift his head to take a look. "You mean generally, or me specifically?"
"You specifically. I wouldn't expect all humans had that ability, what with how protective of them they are."
"Officially, I'm a bit sentimental about them too. But I know a guy who knows a guy with a secret lab for that sort of thing."
"Will it matter to you if you have to resort to that?"
The human gave him, or at least his holomatter, a serious look. "How much of me do you think is actually the original Tony Stark?"
"How would I know? We're new around here."
===
Stark came to visit the cycle after he had been released from the human hospital. He looked brand new. His body underneath the suit did as well.Ratchet knew enough about human physiology to be dubious. "Should you really be up and about?"
"My database in Malibu says it never retrieved some of the mission logs from the backstrut drives," Stark explained. "I need to see if there's enough left that I can restore the data."
"Oh. Er, sorry. There wasn't much left intact, so I just disposed of it."
"I'd say 'ask me next time' but I don't want to imply I'm jonesing for a repeat..."
"Again, sorry. I didn't know you had datacatchers in it."
Stark's arc reactor pulsed briefly, like a flicker of Wheeljack's sidelights. As far as Ratchet knew, Stark couldn't control these endearing little expressions. "How many datacatchers do Cybertronian bodies have, on average?" he asked promptly, grey matter clearly busy behind that helmet of his.
Ratchet shifted on his feet. "Tony, we still have a mute order from higher up. There's nothing I can do."
"You can ignore it."
"Yes, and face arrest and court-martial."
Stark flew up and landed on one of the medbay shelves next to a canister of antifreeze as tall as he was. "Did it never occur that the Decepticons have much the same primary anatomical structure as you do? And that the Decepticons are a common enemy of the Autobots and the Avengers? The more I know, the more we can help."
Ratchet paused in the midst of washing down his work table. For some reason, no matter how many times he sanitised it, the bioscanners were still picking up blood traces. "How might knowing about our topical sensors help you fight the Decepticons?" he asked the armour-clad Stark.
"I wouldn't know unless I had the data, would I? Maybe I could rig up a subsynaptical stealth signal and get inside one and use a distributed autodialer function to overload his nervous centres. Or her. You do have females, right?"
"Yes and no. It's complicated."
"But Bumblebee...?"
Ratchet cringed. For all their efforts, the Autobots had not managed to shake the Avengers of their habit of calling Bumblebee 'she'. The kid was getting understandably exasperated.
"Our holomatter result from the same scanning process that acquired our vehicle forms. We didn't even know your species was sexually dimorphic when we landed here."
"So, can you change them?"
"Easily. They wouldn't be effective infiltration tools if we couldn't."
"Show me."
Ratchet scowled at the human. He would have vastly preferred to continue his cleaning instead, hopefully uninterrupted. But he supposed a demonstration without explaining the mechanism behind it was fair under the gag order, and it might sate Stark's curiosity for a while.
Well, he could dream.
"Fine. But I need a reference to scan."
"Can you scan me?"
He did. Stark was amused by the results.
"Now that's cool," he said approvingly, flitting around the new holomatter shape. Ratchet didn't have enough data on Stark's propulsion systems to parrot his flight behaviour, so he sufficed to have it stand rather than break surreally with physics. "Hey, take its helmet off. Let's see if he's as handsome as I am."
"I can't," said Ratchet. "It's a only a texture over a mesh. My usual avatar can't remove his clothes either."
"Good thing nobody was asking him to." Stark pushed a finger against the holomatter's shoulder plating. He hmmed upon seeing the 'metal' give slightly. "You should reconfigure the field resistance to reflect a harder material, shouldn't you?"
"That'd be a bit tedious to programme," Ratchet answered, unwilling to add that he wasn't quite sure how to even start. Wheeljack had done most of the original coding.
Ratchet's audio receptors picked up a hissing sound. Stark unlatched and removed his helmet, damp, hairy head coming into view once more. He smoothed his hair down with his fingers. "How about a new scan, then? I'd like to see how you handle faces."
The mech watched him suspiciously. Stark being confident was always cause for concern: it meant he had just learned something. And he was learning a little much these days.
"I better not," Ratchet said. He shut down his holomatter entirely, to be greeted by an annoyed tongue-cluck from Stark. "Sorry, but..."
"Hey, Doc, don't worry about it," said Stark, in one of those human tones that were maddeningly difficult to figure out. He replaced his helmet and flew up to hover at optics-level with the medic. "Orders are orders, right?"
"It's difficult to say what's appropriate for you to know and what isn't," Ratchet said darkly. "You're a clever human, Tony."
"I think of myself more like machine, most of the time."
What a pretentious thing to say. "You don't think that's overstating things a little?"
"Not really, no. Actually, I'd like to know what your planet's policy is on naturalisation."
"We don't have one."
"That's a little xenophobic, don't you think?"
"No, I mean, we don't have a planet. Not anymore."
"Oh."
An awkward silence fell in. The human, being impatient as his species often was, broke it first.
"No citizenship test?" he asked.
Ratchet sighed and decided to humour him. "Wouldn't you miss being a human?"
"I still am human. After a fashion."
"Wouldn't you miss your lifestyle here on Earth? We have no private sector, you know: no land rights, no free enterprise, not even what you might call civilian life."
He seemed to shrug, although the effect was largely lost inside the armour. "As long as you have beautiful women, I don't see what the problem is."
Ratchet flinched. "We need to clarify something, Tony..."
"I'm not saying anything! Besides, Bumblebee's not my type. She's kind of... plain."
"He, Tony. I mean, I suppose it's a little arbitrary, but generally we identify--"
"Are you male?"
"There are no males! There are no females! We don't reproduce the way humans do. Gender bifurcation is a very recent phenomenon--"
"So you could just as easily make a female avatar?"
Ratchet was close to swatting Stark right out of the air. "Yes, Tony. That's the whole point. But what does it--"
"So why not a different default?"
The medic grew exasperated. "What's wrong with my current avatar?"
"Oh, nothing! I'd just say-- if gender's just a filter through which a species like mine sees you-- I'd argue it's far more logical for your avatar to be female."
Ratchet paused. "Really now."
"It's more to your personality."
"My personality is female?"
"A little, yeah. Okay, a lot. You're still sending mixed signals, actually. I only ask because--"
Ratchet could see where this was going. Again. "I'm not sure I'm comfortable with this conversation," he said icily.
Stark darted a few metres away, out of Ratchet's personal space. "No problem," he said, using that indecipherable tone again. "Hey, mind if I go take a look through your trash for those cuttings?"
"We put it through the incinerator."
"My mistake. And of course we know now what the melting point on that suit is. I guess 'Jack won't let me into my workshop anymore, either."
"We found the bugs you installed in the ceiling."
Stark had the dignity to look awkward. "Wow. Uh. I bet that makes me look bad. Actually I was visiting to... remove... those..."
"I think you should go, Tony."
===
Ratchet berated himself for assuming the best out of Stark. The subterfuge was understandable, of course --after all, the Autobots were bugging the Avengers' headquarters as well-- but the parts he was absolutely unrepentant about were the parts Ratchet just couldn't forgive. Stark had now become officially creepy. And with him, of all 'bots.The Autobots did not exactly ban Stark or any of the other Avengers from their base, and true to form, they continued to visit, just as an Autobot here or there would occasionally stop by the superhumans' HQ. But both sides were aware of the icy distance between them, and both knew exactly whom to blame.
Ratchet was outside DC the next time he saw Stark. His first instinct was to avoid contact, but that was difficult to do when one party was a clever little human the other was currently in cognito as an ambulance parked outside an ER.
The medic detected a human presence approaching his passenger side, but knew of no subtle way to repel it until it had already rigged open the door lock and climbed in.
"Don't make any sudden moves. This is a heist," said Stark. He was out of his shell, in a business suit. He may as well have been nude.
Ratchet's holomatter glared at him, hands still on the wheel.
Stark examined the projection. "Nice. Although I don't think the paramedic getup suits your figure too well."
"It's on a trial basis only," Ratchet replied defensively.
At least, that's what he had told himself when he'd scanned a new driver avatar. The possibility that humans really would respond to him differently in a female shape just wouldn't leave his mind. He'd already discovered second-hand how Jazz versus Wheeljack were treated based on their avatars' skin pigmentation, so it seemed logical the same would apply to other distinctions. It was a completely justifiable social experiment.
Really.
"Do you always just take the scans wholecloth? No alterations?"
"None."
"But you could. Adjust the bumpmaps and the lean layers and so on. Well, I'm not a CG artist or anything, so what do I know? So how are the physics on the twins?"
"...Runabout and Runamok?"
"No, honey, these."
Ratchet's avatar looked down in surprise as Stark's hand cupped one of her breasts and gave it an experimental squeeze.
"...I can't tell," said Stark, when nothing further occurred. "Are you giving me permission or do you just not know what the code of conduct is here?"
"Please stop touching that," Ratchet sighed, not altogether in the mood for games. "It might have escaped you, but I'm on a stake-out."
"What, the neural-hacker who just downloaded confidental material into his brain and then started having seizures?" Stark gave the mammary another trial squeeze and then, apparently disappointed, let it go. "We've got feds inside handling him right now. A cursory scan with the projection interface I set up indicates it was nothing related to your people's movements."
"That your government has such an extensive file on us at all is bad news," Ratchet reminded him.
"Hey, I just noticed, you changed your voice modulator to match the avatar. Is that across the board?"
Ratchet narrowed his avatar's eyes at Stark and dropped the filter. "No," he said in his normal voice.
"Oh, god, don't do that again."
"What does your government know about us, Stark?" Ratchet asked tersely, retaining his uninflected voice just to irk him.
"I haven't fed them anything, if that's what your asking. My tech isn't exactly open source, so why should yours be? I know about the Machination," he added. "And I find it appalling, if that helps."
"We're dealing with it," Ratchet said curtly, avatar staring straight ahead.
"I could expedite matters," Stark offered. "I do have some political pull."
"No, thanks. It's appreciated, but we prefer not to bring in uninvolved third parties if we can help it. It's really as simple as that. I'm sorry, but it causes too many problems for both sides."
"...Are you being straight with me there, or is that some subtext I should be looking into?"
Ratchet knew humans were hormonal creatures, but he couldn't believe Stark just dragged the conversation back in that direction. "Tony, you haven't the first clue about Cybertronian recreation. And you never will. So please get out of me and go about your day."
"In case you haven't noticed, I'm compatible."
"A human can place his sex organ in a car's exhaust pipe. Does that make it a meaningful union?"
"Oh. So you've seen that website too."
Ratchet had his avatar's teeth clench to better convey himself. "Please just go before I have to do something dramatic."
"Just so you're properly aware, I'd only do something like that with a car if it could talk back."
"You're very chivalrous. Out, please." He opened his passenger door for him.
Stark didn't budge. "I'm just saying, I don't go propositioning any piece of machinery I see--"
"I'm male."
"Aha! Only on a technicality, right?"
That was enough. Ratchet bucked the passenger seat and tossed Stark out onto the pavement.
"And I have an exclusivity contract, all right?!"
Stark picked himself up into a sitting position. The pavement was damp from recent rainfall, but he didn't seem to pay it much thought.
"That's fair," he said. "Can you tell me any details?"
"Three seconds until I fire, human."
"No, come on, just--"
"Two."
"--It's a legitimate scientific inquiry--"
"One."
Stark sprinted for the treeline faster than any human Ratchet had ever seen.
===
Ratchet paced the floor of Wheeljack's workshop furiously."It just keeps getting worse!" he told his comrade. "I just don't see what his glitch is! Imbalance. Something," he amended himself, but quickly resumed: "All the mechs on this crew, and he trains himself on me."
Wheeljack, who had listened to Ratchet's tirade with patience and amusement, could offer very little on that point. Actually, the similarities between him and Stark were well-documented, down to the intense and unnerving stare they both adopted when interested in something. And given a few megacycles, Stark would probably match Wheeljack for the number of times he would wind up on Ratchet's operating table with unfortunate foreign objects lodged in his body. That is, if the relationship between their two groups didn't continue to decline, and if Ratchet didn't kill Stark personally the next time he saw him.
"Maybe he thinks you're a sucker for the bright-eyed novice sort," Wheeljack suggested mildly.
"He's not a novice, 'Jack. He's almost at 50% life expectancy. And he isn't so cute when he's attempting human relations with your holomatter." When Wheeljack just shrugged again, Ratchet threw up his hands. "Why do I bother? Of course you see it his way!"
"You remember how we met?" Wheeljack asked meaningfully.
Ratchet sighed. "You were in twenty-eight pieces and had two millicycles before critical spark containment failure," he recounted. He seated himself and braced his head with a hand. "When you woke up again, the first thing you asked was if I still had the shrapnel that had pierced your power core lying around."
"And you hadn't."
"You didn't need to get so angry about it. The damn thing nearly offlined you. If it were me, I'd never want to even think about it again."
"But that's the kinda 'bot I am," Wheeljack reminded, sidelights flickering in a way to suggest a grin. Not so different from Stark's arc reactor, really. "And that's the kinda human he is. And you and I worked out."
"One of you is enough," Ratchet groaned.
"You wanna know what I think?"
Ratchet gave him a serious look. "Wheeljack, you only ever think two things: 'can I learn from it?', or 'can I blow it up?'"
"I haven't blown you up yet."
"You've tried."
"All right, now you're just exaggerating." Apparently, Wheeljack didn't think overclocking Ratchet's main processors to twelve times spec was attempted murder, just another act of coupling. "Hey, I'd draft the research proposal myself if I didn't know Prowl was gonna shoot it down. But if Stark's gunnin' for you anyway, why not let him? You know what I'm like, so you should already know how he handles," Wheeljack added slyly, leaning over to him.
Ratchet pushed him away again. If there was anything that defined Wheeljack, apart from his propensity to blow others and himself up, it was that he was an unrepentant pervert when it came to interfacing. Things like the overclocking episode didn't even begin to describe some of the kinks in his cabling. And Ratchet could all too easily imagine that sort of cavalierness out of Stark as well. And he didn't want to picture that.
Not that these were points to bring up with 'Jack, who seemed to be systematically reformulating Stark into a protege in his mind. But even Wheeljack could be forced to be practical. "Our scans have already told us all we really need about human procreation," said the medic. "I doubt direct observation could teach us anything new."
"We also thought we'd mastered human expression when we made our avatars smile," Wheeljack pointed out. "Anyway, you're overlookin' the master plan of this all. All these planets we've been stationed on, and no-one's done a good, close study of inter-species coupling. And don't give me that 'ethnic purity' scrap; I know you're above that sorta talk..."
"If I was going to interface with an alien, it still wouldn't be Anthony Stark the Iron Human," Ratchet argued, regretting he had come down here to talk in the first place. Was it too late to pin Wheeljack against a wall and change the subject? "He's dangerous. He's careless. He's probably bugging this room right now."
"Removed it earlier this cycle," Wheeljack volunteered, holding up the shattered device with a pair of tweezers. He returned it neatly to the array of junk on his workbench, inexplicably locating the exact spot where he'd had the thing before. "You forgot to mention he's got a spark, which is more than you can say for most aliens."
Ratchet relented on that point. That was true: Stark was organic, but he shared with Transformers the most crucial part of themselves. It didn't matter physiologically --Ratchet was confident enough in his understanding of human biology to suspect Stark would gain very little from a massive electrical current running through his body-- but did it really change him psychologically, like he claimed it did? And did that interest Ratchet more than he was admitting to himself?
"You know what I'd do," Wheeljack concluded, probably noticing Ratchet's expression change even before Ratchet knew what had happened to his own train of thought. "I'd get a research grant and document everything."
=== Ratchet was determined to be stubborn. As it happened, Stark bolstered this position a great deal, by doing little more than be himself. A few more bloody incidents in the medbay and Ratchet decided he couldn't possibly be interested in Stark's fluids enough to explore the matter further.
Or so he resolved to himself, but the human had a way of sticking in a 'bot's mind. In a sense, he'd been able to infiltrate that far better than he had the Autobots' base itself. Ratchet had no idea whom to blame except himself, for being so susceptible.
Then came the next joint mission with the Avengers, and the Autobots were introduced to Stark's newly upgraded "mobile suit" mecha, with enhanced balance gyros and a quickchange matrix in the backstruts to replace the staged munitions release of his earlier model. His reaction movements were largely as sluggish as before, but he did have far more guns.
Ratchet was able to think of nothing except how much he hated the little cretin for three cycles straight.
Irresponsible, Ratchet thought: immature, sophomoric, warmongering slag. Was this where humans thought industrial exuberance should lead? If Stark just wanted to blow himself up, he shouldn't expect Ratchet to be there to pick up the pieces next time. He knew for a fact that humans did not stitch together well once they came apart. Certainly there were some parts even Stark's friends-of-friends couldn't regrow for him in a lab somewhere.
Of course, the fact that Stark's new mecha had not only fought well but significantly out-performed some of their ground forces was even more aggravating. For a human achievement, it was more than a little formidable-- and more than a little offending. And Stark was blissfully ignorant of his own impetuousness. It was infuriating. It was Wheeljack in human form, and significantly less pleasant.
"Hm," Ratchet heard Wheeljack say at the end of the incident, as they watched their human cohorts and the great awful mecha fly away: "Anomalous for the species, but still prototypical mating behaviour..."
Ratchet punched him.
===
Wheeljack had a wonderful talent for deliberately making things worse, it seemed.Things were supposed to wind down to normal after that episode. Suffice to say, they didn't. Stark's new mecha was causing a furor among the Autobot brass, all of whom wanted to know where this human's tech was coming from, why his was the only Earthbound machinery to exhibit it, and if Ark-19 was conducting themselves in an efficient and legal fashion down there. Optimus was even called off planetside to answer for the incident personally, leaving Prowl in charge again. And things were never pleasant under Prowl.
Creatures of all stripe and composition seek out methods of stress relief during periods of anxiety. In this regard, humans and Transformers had a closely analogous response. Wheeljack and Ratchet had done this dozens of times to calm down, and it should have worked out that way this time, but luck just wasn't on Ratchet's side when it involved Stark.
The mechanic grunted, once, as their I/O cable clicked into place. With tier-two permission, Wheeljack had free reign with most of Ratchet's motherboard, and tonight he chose to dispense with their usual build-up and go straight for the adrenal gauges. Ratchet clenched the gears in his jaw and sought better purchase, braced against a wall duct with Wheeljack flush against his back. His companion slid an arm over a shoulder and let the first strong, hot pulse go through over the line, spreading over critical circuitry and forcing open the adrenal cables. In a few refreshes, the pair were completely senseless.
Ratchet's topical sensors detected Wheeljack panting close to his shoulder. The feedback must already be overheating some of his secondary boards. "Slag, Ratchet," the medic heard him groan. "You're so good."
The medic moaned in reply. This was still going a little fast for him. Even with permissions set on a default high tier, you couldn't just push so much electricity through a conduit without warming it up. Some of his failsafes began to engage of their own accord, stirring up his energon pump faster and releasing even more current into the system. He parted an extra few vents to lessen the burden on his heatsinks.
Wheeljack noticed the activity and used a bit of static to nip at the relays. Ratchet's fans hitched; Wheeljack laughed lightly. The current reached him again across their cable. He let it roll through him steadily, shake him down into the knee joints, before pulsing it back over to Ratchet's side, even stronger than before.
Ratchet shut his raster feed off as the current started to overpower him. "You debugged the room, didn't you?"
"Hnn?"
"You checked for bugs, right?"
The signal pushed deeper. Almost too deep. Wheeljack said, "We're clean. But he keeps getting better at hiding them. He's good at getting under your plating, isn't he?"
The medic's entire chassis shuddered. Wheeljack felt it, stroking a flank. "You'd like him under your hood, wouldn't you?" he whispered.
"Primus, 'Jack!"
"You would. Imagine what I could do if I had hands small enough to tweak some of your diodes. You want him inside you. He could overclock your decacores in a flash, couldn't he?"
Ratchet couldn't handle to hear anymore. He wanted to push Wheeljack off him and tear out of there, or at least shut it all off-- but the current hit again, and found just that right spot along his nervous relays, and his whole body seized and convulsed. He dug his fingers into the side of the duct and prayed his adrenal cabling wouldn't burst.
"What are you doing?" he coughed soon after, waiting out the aftershocks before attempting to move. "Are you trying to sabotage us?"
"I'm not jealous of a primate," Wheeljack grunted, still clinging to his partner, although now it was out of necessity as his walk protocols rebooted. "I'm a scientist."
"'Jack, listen. I don't want to--" And Ratchet found he couldn't finish that sentence anymore.
But he couldn't do it. He refused. Not while Stark still had that stupid mecha of his, that offending hybrid of stolen tech that was upsetting command. Actually, there was probably no condition under which the human could be acceptable. There couldn't be. Ratchet wouldn't stand for it.
As Wheeljack awkwardly staggered off him and disconnected their cable, Ratchet slumped harder against the wall duct. Well, okay, so there were a lot of things that Ratchet was unable to stand for, and still managed to put up with.
It was slowly dawning on the medic that he was running out of excuses.
"'Document everything', you said," he recalled with resignation. He began slowly pushing himself upright.
"What he does, what he tries, what he's interested in," Wheeljack said, smoothing his chest panelling. "Shame there's nothin' of his we really want, or we could see what he might be willing to sell it for."
"Some of his comrades have resilience attributes we'd do well to envy," Ratchet pointed out.
"I'm casing them separately. Already got agents on the ground."
"I see. And I'm your agent for Stark. I wish I'd known that a bit earlier."
"Like I said, no material worth, which is slaggin' frustrating considering what he's stealing from us. Even his flight system is so backwards we can't really do anything with it. The only thing that leaves is why he's so interested in you."
"Because he's a deviant?" Ratchet offered up sarcastically. "Like you?"
"If only we had Sunstreaker," Wheeljack said wistfully, not even paying attention. "Affluent human males like sports cars. And the kid had a female default for his holomatter..."
Something lit up in the back of Ratchet's mind. "Sunstreaker!"
"Yeah, like I was saying--"
"No, he-- Stark once told me he could help us confront the Machination. We know that they're funded by the government in this country," Ratchet went on, reasoning; "a frontal assault hasn't worked so far, but we both know bureaucracy is its own anathema..."
Wheeljack gave him a serious look. "He offered you that?"
"He might just have been boasting," Ratchet admitted. "But it's very possible."
Wheeljack nodded coolly. Ratchet could almost hear his logic drive whirring. That slightly creepy look that he shared with Stark was coming back.
"You know what we're talkin' about, I hope," said the mechanic.
"It's apparently the only thing on your or his mind lately," Ratchet noted.
"Consider this your proper motivation. I still want it logged thoroughly."
Ratchet breathed to ease the strain on some of his internal fans. He had clocked down to normal a while ago, but for some reason, his heat signatures were still elevated. "All right," he said at last. "But I'm going to need some modifications first."
===
Humans. Individually they were confusing, but as a mass they tended to follow basic chaos theory. They moved in clusters, fissioned into smaller groups, reunited into larger ones; they swarmed over the same patch of paved or tiled ground and emitted signals that were mostly for the purpose of generating feedback. Are you there? Yes. Are you still there? Yes.It was hard to tolerate humans in large groups, and even harder to stand the ones which gathered in a city like Los Angeles, where the ping timeouts were so short that all the little bodies seemed to be moving in double time. From a distance --say, from an aerial view-- Ratchet was sure it looked fascinating, like an ever-evolving fractal. In the midst of it, he was only getting dizzy, and the shoes certainly didn't help.
For the purposes of this mission, Wheeljack had recommended he go embedded, which meant his holomatter's range of sight and hearing, and very little else, to go on. Certainly no weapons, except the electromagnetic charge that would result if he told the avatar to blow itself up. What that would do for his consciousness at the time, he didn't want to imagine.
Wheeljack had thoroughly overhauled holomatter functionality for this event, so, thought Ratchet, it had damn well better come to some good. Any closer to human and he might as well be riding around inside the brain of a real one, which would be weirdly ironic, if he thought about it. Stark would probably see more humour in it than he did.
At least the avatar was artificial enough that he didn't have to rely entirely on available light to see by. This was ostensibly a social gathering, but Ratchet failed to see how a garden party after dark, even in the summer months, was conducive to that behaviour. Fortunately, he needed only navigate to the target position, and the satellite homing signature they had planted on Tony Stark's suit several hours before guided Ratchet's avatar right to him. Once sensors indicated he was about to step into view, he engaged the second series of Wheeljack's advanced human walking protocols and gracefully --somehow, in these disproportionately skinny heels-- glided around from behind a cluster of random human probability to where the man of the hour was standing by himself.
"Mister Stark."
Stark looked away from the patch of space he had been staring into. Ratchet detected a moment without recognition, then confusion-- then smarmy, patronising approval.
"Well," he said, appearing calm, but Ratchet noticed his eyes light up. "This is an occasion. So what brings you all the way out here to me?"
"Just stopping in," Ratchet said cooly, with a small smile. "I've thought a lot about your proposition."
She had glided into the edge of his one metre of personal space that Americans believed that they had. With those words, Stark moved even closer to her-- too quickly, even he seemed to realise, but he smoothed his movements before saying, "Really."
There was that intense look again. Perhaps it was simply his resonance with a certain Autobot, but something about the gaze was simply... electrical.
Focus, focus, focus.
"Yes," Ratchet said through his avatar, silkily, maintaining the lilt that Los Angeles females tended to use. "We've made some adjustments I think you'll find interesting, if you wanted to continue this conversation elsewhere."
As he said it, Ratchet, ever so casually, guided the avatar's hand up to one of the thin red straps to her dress, lifting it and adjusting it in such away that Stark would be sure to see the mesh layers interacting.
Stark's eyes looked like they were about to pop out of his head. The hand unoccupied holding his drink started to jerk up to touch, but he remembered himself just in time, and smoothed the front of his jacket instead. So he did have some social graces, at least when the potential to be seen existed.
He cleared his throat. Ratchet shifted the avatar's posture again. He was beginning to understand the extend that nonverbal cues played in human mating, as evidenced by Stark's gaze which seemed stuck at chest level. "Sounds fine," he managed. "Where are you parked?"
"I'm actually still in Michigan. I'm projecting here via satellite."
"Nice."
Humans were so easily impressed sometimes.
Ratchet shifted the avatar's "weight" to the other hip, brushed a lock of hair behind an ear, and disaffectedly watched the rest of the party-goers as Stark dialed his chauffeur. Frustratingly, all of this was the easy part. Ratchet was sure his processors were pounding in his chest compartment, if he could only feel them. He knew if he thought too hard about what he was doing, there was no way he'd follow through with it.
Fortunately, there were so many trillions of processes working concurrently on this avatar, it left very little room for thought at all. Especially once they were seated in the back of Stark's limousine, en route to his compound up the coast, and Stark moved to try out the dress strap trick for himself. As well as everything else Ratchet's new body could offer.
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