step one: stop fighting robots

[wreckers]

Who: Verity and OPENish
Where: Autobot Clinic
When: Noooow??
What: The fallout of this
Warnings: Injuries, TBD.


[ Once she shook loose from Arcee, Verity bagged out. She was not inclined to trust anyone let alone someone closely associated with Prowl, on good terms or not, but she trusted Arcee to run interference long enough for her to clear out of there. Running away happened to be one of Verity's talents and one she took immediate advantage of when the opportunity presented itself. ]

Shit - shit.

[ Burning rubber screeched on the metal floor of the clinic followed by a loud crash when a disoriented Verity slammed into a nearby steel utility table; spilling all kinds of equipment onto the floor. The clinic was dark - of course it was, everyone was off getting stupid at that party at the forum. Verity swore louder as she staggered up and waved her arm wildly in front of a motion sensor near the doorframe that brought the lights back on.

I fucked up, was all Verity could think while stumbling through the clinic wildly searching for anything that looked human friendly. ]

Enough people on this rock they should have painkillers or someth- hnng.

[ Verity stopped near a minicon sized gurney. She pulled herself up and once she was sitting felt the full force of what a little scuffle with something rip snorting pissed off and over thirty feet tall did. The plates of her armor retracted back until she was down to her clothes. Stomach rolling as she took rapid shallow breaths close to hyperventilating, pulling her shirt up to find angry red and purple bruising covering her entire right side. She cringed, looking down to see the inflamed mess that was her foot that twisted awkwardly at the ankle.

Winded, Verity collapsed on her back. Leaving her armor in pieces around her on the ground as she tried to steady her breathing. ]

Comments

[wreckers]

"I know his type - in love with what he does come hell or high water." Verity leaned back on her hands with her eyes drifting towards the other end of the room but looking a thousand miles away. There was a twinge of guilt in her less than charitable first impression of First Aid now that it stirred up an that yawning chasm in her chest called nostalgia with the easily drawn comparison between him and someone else like him.

"You know how to pick him."

Her ghost of a smile tugged at the corners of her mouth as she rolled back up on her feet. Mindful of the ankle in its brace as she hobbled slow over to Ratchet.

"Ratchet." Her hands weren't necessarily small, but both of them barely wrapped around the narrowest joint of his littler finger. She looked up at him and squeezed, tight as she could to be sure he felt it.

"Pharma had something to do with these, didn't he?"

[asafepairofhands]

Ratchet only barely manages to keep himself from flinching under the press of her soft hands. He would have felt it if she'd touched him with a single fingertip, and he shudders helplessly before pulling his hand away and clenching it until the welded seam of his wrist aches.

"They're his," he says finally, his voice a little choked, not looking at her. "He'd--hell. This is--" He gropes for a place to start, then gives up and shakes his head. "When we got to his post on Delphi, nine-tenths of everyone at the base was dead from this... rust virus. We don't get wasting diseases often, but when we do, best to just get the hell out of the way--we don't mess around. Except the other part of the reason we went to Delphi was because someone--First Aid, though I hadn't known it--had used the same frequency as the old Wreckers Declassified datalogs to send out a wave of semi-encrypted patient data detailing a rise of deaths at Delphi, and not because of the plague."

Ratchet cycles his vents, taking a rattling gust of cool air in and blowing warm out, trying to steady himself.

"Turns out Delphi was on Messatine, in the center of DJD territory, and Pharma had been murdering patients to give their organs to the DJD to keep them from slaughtering everyone. In the end, it drove him crazy. He knew he couldn't keep it up, so he cooked up the virus in the lab and let it loose on the base to try to cover his tracks. Pipes and Drift went with me to the base--they both contracted the virus, I contracted the virus. There was a scuffle with some Decepticons and First Aid woke Fort Max, Pharma made a break for the roof and I followed him. I was halfway rusted to death and we had it out on the roof like a couple of morons over the cure for the stupid thing, I nearly knocked him off the roof entirely and he tried to blow my head off. Drift--" He falters, stops. He doesn't even know how to begin to talk to Verity about Drift. He doesn't know how much of their strange, patchwork history is even his to tell, regardless of how open Drift had been about it around the table with Rung. His optics drop down to his hands and he's silent for a moment, trying again to find where to begin, then just gives up. "I don't know if you know him. But he somehow followed me up--he was worse along than I was, he nearly died, half his organs were rusted through--and he chopped Pharma's hands off at the wrists to cut him off the roof right before he could shoot me in the back. I only had one arm at that point, and we had a medical bay full of patients who were dying not to mention the one leaking out at my feet on the roof, so... I took them. They're--they were his. But they're the only reason I can still do my job--they're just as good as mine were. Pharma was just as good as I was, before... everything."

He flexes his fingers slowly, then very deliberately settles his palms flat against the table. Now that he's drawn attention to them, the chips and scuffs in the red paint, exposing the blue beneath, are more obvious. Ratchet cycles his vents again, then reaches out to touch a fingertip to the back of one of Verity's hands, almost an apology for pulling away before.

"It was a hell of a thing," he says finally, a little helplessly. He shrugs. "But everybody who was alive when we got there was alive when we left, so can't call it too much of a loss, I guess."

[wreckers]

Verity watched the soft red welts form in uniform lines along the palm of her hands from the friction of Ratchet yanking back at what was only a small touch. Not enough to break the skin, but it all happened so fast she doesn't register the slight burn right away. It just shocked her that he would recoil like that. That kind of closed off, cagey behavior she expected from - from, well, the likes of her. She looked back up at Ratchet, thrown that buried underneath all that heart and bluster was the kind of pain she recognized. It shouldn't have surprised her that Ratchet carried himself better than most that you forgot a lot of it was a front.

"Delphi?" Verity echoed after her mind stopped doing cartwheels and somewhere in that long overdue, pent up confession did she latch onto something familiar. "That is way beyond mere coincidence that the lead into the goings-on in Garrus-9 from the DJD double-agent came out of somewhere so far flung off everyone's radar like Delphi - and for it to keep coming back around in the last five years. No one in high command could possibly have such a bad sense for real estate. They wanted it at the epicenter of that shitstorm."

Pad of her thumb pushed up under her lip against the teeth, she chews over everything Ratchet said and indirectly implied through either artful dodging of peripheral information or shared context. It was...a lot to take in. And even more to consider.

"Drift, huh? Sounds like a real character with that glowing testimonial." It was more of an outward thought smashed together with a half-hearted attempt to diffuse the stress coiling up tight inside Ratchet. It didn't work, but she would have said something less inoffensive failing that. And then she grew quiet for a while.

"Ratchet..." Verity put one hand over Ratchet's; splayed open and barely even covering one tenth the surface of that bright, warm red hand. "I don't know if telling me this is supposed to be cathartic or if you've left kind of pain hole up inside you for that long thinking even someone like me could make sense of it or offer absolution you do not need, but..."

The hand Ratchet gently covered with his own turned over so she could squeeze the fingertip.

"This Pharma shit the bed on that one and now no one is going to give a good goddamn that those hands are back to doing what they were meant to. Every life you've saved since, and the fact some poor S.O.B orderly isn't stuck holding my ribs together with tape while I bleed out right now is enough for me that what happened on Delphi wasn't a loss for you. You have First Aid now. We still have you."

And then she looked at him, hard. There was more to this.

"But it's not what you did to him that has you jumping at shadows, is it?"

[asafepairofhands]

Ratchet's whole body goes tense at the mention of 'absolution', but he doesn't pull away again, his optics narrowing.

"You're the one who wanted to know what the 'fresh hell' was going on," he snaps--as close as he ever gets to snapping, with her. "If you want to hear a 'glowing testimonial' on Drift's behalf, I'll tell you his name used to be Deadlock and you can let me know if that means anything to you. And when I say that everyone who was alive when we got to Delphi made it out, I meant everyone. Pharma showed up a few months later, on Luna-1. Tyrest had picked him up and given him new hands, so when we showed up he kidnapped and--" He hiccups over a word, one hand coming up unconsciously to press over his windscreen, protective against scratches he can't still feel but that he knows are there, through layers of metal and wires and glass.

"And tortured me," he continues, his vocalizer only slightly frayed, "murdered Ambulon and left his leaking corpse for me to try to 'fix', then apparently laughed about the whole thing--Delphi, Ambulon, all of it--to First Aid, who blew his head off. And rightfully so--it's something I should have done then, instead of leaving him to fall like a coward.

"So, if you wanted a quick rundown of what's been 'going on' with me in particular, there you have it. That's it." His voice is almost savage, but he doesn't really sound angry with her--just... angry in general. Grieving in general. Hurt in general, refusing to allow himself to focus too acutely on any one wound, too used to not having the time or the luxury to reopen any of them, even to let them heal properly.

"Tarn's here, and Pharma's here and he remembers all of it, and instead of trying to make up for the dozens--hundreds--he murdered outright let alone everyone he tried to slaughter with the killswitch, the first thing he does is go and hack First Aid's arm off, for some stupid, petty 'revenge.' So, yeah, forgive me if I'm 'jumping at shadows.' It's been that kind of year."

[wreckers]

The abruptness of the his outburst with everything he had let haunt them for the course of 'this kind of' year pouring out hit Verity like a truck, so to speak.

"Ratchet-"

Her throat seized and the name she, the empathy and shock in her voice broke over her lips like glass. Verity takes a wobbling step back, knees shivering witH one leg balanced on a twisted ankle, and her hands drawn up close to her own chest, squeezing them together tight enough that her knuckles were bloodless. It's a miracle she can look him in the eye; she hates when her eyes string. Heart beating against her ribs like a songbird raging against its cage. Taking the wheel over her own difficult to navigate emotions, but when it was someone else. Someone else, she-

-wants everyone to think she's tough and independent, but you wonder sometimes.

Like ice freezing in the hard fissures of these fronts they put, ripping them open wider over time and eroding them away from the inside. She knew that act and the consequences of it better than the back of her hand. She swallows what feels like a mouthful of sand and steps forward again.

"It's okay to be scared."

People have been telling her for years, and it was shame she never bothered to bend an ear in the right direction until now when someone else needed to hear it.

"It's okay to be scared."

Verity didn't apologize - it wasn't her place to, and neither did she press for details. Not yet. Instead she hobbled over and mindful of the gap between Ratchet and the table slowly leaned against his arm. The best she could do in the way of a hug when the one breaking open in front of her was thirty something feet and made of metal.

[asafepairofhands]

Ratchet stares down at her with a helpless, unreadable expression expression on his face and for a truly awful moment his optics flare, bright and hot, light barely spilling from the edges--then he shutters them, and warm air hisses from his vents in a long, shivering gust as he relaxes, deliberately releasing the tension in his limbs, his face easing. He shifts slightly, scooping her up in one hand and almost cradling her.

"You shouldn't be on that leg," he says roughly, but all of the thin, ragged tension is bled from his voice, and his optics are clear when he onlines them again. He just holds her for a long moment.

"I still have scalpel cuts on my spark casing," he says, almost thoughtfully. "But I'm not scared of--of Pharma hurting me, or anything stupid like that. If I cared about that, Tarn would have a new t-cog by now and I wouldn't be hobbling around on these damn things. I guess I'm more afraid of failing. Failing the people at home, failing Drift, failing everyone here. Failing you." He smooths down the back of her neck with his thumb, careful of her head injury. "You scared the hell out of me with that seizure garbage, I'm not kidding. Knock it off."

His mouth tilts a little, lopsided, not quite a smile.

"But... sorry, kid. I know it hasn't exactly been one long party for you, the past five years. You don't need my mess on top of it. It's just--a lot has changed. It's hard to describe, otherwise."

[wreckers]

Verity makes a soft oof sound when Ratchet lifts her off the table single-single-handed. Nothing about being cradled by someone who was comprised almost entirely of hard edges and only somewhat malleable metal was exactly comfortable, but Verity felt more aafe here than anywhere else in the big wide universe. She was just glad the sound and fury of Ratchet's long overdue eruption didn't come with an explosive aftershock.

"Idiot." She breathed out, knocking her forehead gently against the side of Ratchet's arm. "You're the only one with millions of years of experience keeping the wayward misfits and suicidally optimistic alive and together."

Tarn and Pharma, even Prowl, were all just distant names unattached to any more nightmares right now. Verity smiled back and for once, actually relaxed.

"I already died once, remember?" It was true - she and Jimmy were clinically dead for a harrowing six minutes and would have stayed that way without Ratchet's intervention. Her suit was originally designed to insulat her from the hazards of an organic in orbital jump. "Not much else but time and universal apocalypse keeping me out of your hair. Someone has to make sure you don't burn out worrying about all of us."

[asafepairofhands]

"Yes, I remember, and I expressly forbid you to even consider doing it again," Ratchet says severely. "And we've had two of those apocalypses since leaving Luna-1, so I'll count myself lucky you're still around to keep me in line."

He watches her go limp in his grip, watches the tension ease on her face, and it makes him relax further too instead of tensing up, though his grip shifts to hold her a little more securely. He nudges her cheek with his thumb.

"And, I'll worry if I want. Like you could stop me, especially if you're going to go around picking fights with people five times your size and made of much denser and more solid materials."

[wreckers]

"Hmpf. And I'm the one who needs to be watched?" Verity pulls a face - touched when Ratchet held her but as her default setting was prickly she was like a cat pretending it didn't appreciate the affection.

"Put me down - I'm not a little kid that needs a boost every time it has a tantrum." Verity was in higher spirits when she said that, although her argument was somewhat dampened by how she squirmed out of his arms much like an agitated child. And, if she really wanted to think too long about the ludicrous lifespan of Cybertronians, she was a child. At least with Ratchet the age disparity didn't feel like he was talking down to her.

Joints pop as she stretches her arms up after she settles back on the desk, mindful of how she sits on her still healing ankle if just for Ratchet's sake.

"Optimus alluded to as much, but I can always just jack the details from after-action reviews with sloppy encryption. And speaking of worrying..."

Verity looks down at Ratchet's leg - or rather, the lack there of, then back him. Then back at his leg and back at him again. The comment on if and when he would see to his leg's repairs non verbalised but transparent.

[asafepairofhands]

Ratchet releases her and gives her an exceedingly flat look, lips compressing.

"I'll get to it," he says repressively, "when I get to it. I'm fine and functional right now, and it's not like I'm not going to get tired of hobbling around on these damn things eventually." He gestures with one of the crutches, as though he didn't ache under his arms and down his elbows and socket-locked wrists, as though his remaining leg wasn't starting to ache consistently as it took more and more weight as he tried to ease up from the crutches to spare his hands. "It's not like losing a human limb, all right? I'll pop one back on once we can get the time and the resources."

[wreckers]

"No." Verity bites backs with renewed semse of vigor that purpose Ratchet neither anticipate not wanted.

"Phantom pain jolts your joints and burns where it shouldn't; I'm getting sick of the disparities being drawn in the fucking sand like their absolutes when you and I both know what ties humans and Cybertronians together is an unmitigated sense that pain is transient between mind and body."

The way she stands, shaking on a hobbled leg is precarious as it is almost Prime like of jer.

"Physician heal thy self if a saying of ours, too."