robothell | (no subject)

Entry tags:

first aid | lifepersists

(no subject)

Who: First Aid & open
What: post-Tarn drama
When: SHRUG
Where: Autobot Medibay
Warnings: mention of horrible robot gore, hospital setting

First Aid was conscious before he had sight, but the damage to his brain made him too confused to really react much, so eventually he just faded back to unconsciousness. The next time he onlined it was to test his eyes, and he remembers flinching at the light as the freshly built apertures of his optics cycled to pinpoints. Funny, he can't feel his face. That's mildly alarming.

Coherency was a slow build, but by the time First Aid felt fully awake he finally was aware enough of his surroundings to realize where he was, but not entirely how he ended up there. His whole body ached, and he didn't have the strength to lift his hands to his still numb face.

Even after the surgery his frame was sort of a mess of patches of weld marks, not yet fully integrated with his auto-repair to be painted over. His face itself was the worst part, having suffered the most damage, and most of it was a dull gray instead of his usual bright white.

Recharge didn't quite seem too unpleasant, especially when confined to a slab and hooked up to life support and IVs feeding fuel directly into his lines.

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Sixshot's been at First Aid's side since the moment he'd been allowed to occupy the space. Sometimes he paces, which probably drove Ratchet up several walls.

Mostly he sleeps.

He's sleeping when First Aid wakes up, curled up in his wolf mode with his nose very, very gently bumping up against the side of the medic's tiny hand.

"First Aid...?"

Ratchet's by the slab and reaching out, curling one of First Aid's mostly-fixed hands in between both of his and pressing very, very gently, his voice raw with staticky exhaustion and relief.

"First Aid, hey. Just--squeeze my hand if you can hear me all right, yeah? Take it slow."

The sentiment probably would have been the same by leaving a vial of innermost energon like a normal person, but once First Aid has some coherency he probably won't complain.

He's very tired, but loss of active energon and a weak spark pulse would do that. When he wakes again, his hand twitches, clumsily brushing over Sixshot's nose. First Aid is uncoordinated-- it's hard for him to really make sense of his movements, so at first he doesn't realize what he was touching.

Slowly, his optics online, and he turns his head -- that was easy, just flopping it to the side -- and focuses on the large bulk at the side of the slab.

"Kffft." He spits confused, sleepy static from his vocalizer.

First Aid's fingers are stiff, as are most newly repaired joints before they've had the chance to work out their full range of motion. A medic's hands are even more important-- more intricate wiring, more connections, tiny transformations.

The light in First Aid's optics flickers a few times before he ever has the strength to squeeze, but there it is. One small twitch of his fingers, barely tight enough to be a grip.

"R-Ratchet."

Did Decepticons even leave their sick and injured vials of innermost energon? Who knows? There's a bit of a hole in the canon in regards to Decepticon cultural practices unfortunately.

It's not something Sixshot had ever done even if it were a thing for them, and it never occurs to him to just leave some kind of well-wishing present for First Aid to begin with. The only worthwhile thing Sixshot has known to do and can do now, was to protect First Aid.

His sleep was shallow and proximity sensors alert him to the medic's stirring. Sixshot doesn't move however, not beyond dimly relighting his optics, his eyes tracking the confused twitch of First Aid's fingers.

"Try not to move too much," he says softly.

The light of First Aid's visor powers down again for a few moments and he's seemingly gone back to sleep. He was really tired, and the siren call of recharge was always there, but he vents deep a moment later and his hand blindly reaches out until he manages to pat Sixshot's nose a few more times and settle down limply on the large snoot.

He was confused. Why was Sixshot here? Medical base programming informed him he was in the ICU. Other instinct informed him Ratchet would have punted him out before he ever managed to ooze onto the floor in touching range. There could be contaminants.

His vocalizer makes a few whirs and clicks as it calibrates. It would take about a day before it was fully settled in.

"Feel like..." Good start. Full of static, low volume, but functional. "Got hit with a World Burner."

Shutting his optic off, Sixshot turns his head into the shaky touch, finally, finally letting relief wash over him. First Aid was stable. First Aid was alive.

"Not exactly." Tarn wasn't quite that classification of power, but he was close. Not that he needed to be close to hurt First Aid; the medic wasn't anywhere near the same level of power as even the lowest ranking Warrior Elite.

"You should go back to sleep. Self repair is going to take a while to sort through everything." At least, that's what the medical techie support team always told him and Sixshot had always done his best to obey. Didn't really work out with the mission loads he tended to get though.

Being a non-combatant usually made your body somewhat fragile. He was still a war frame, but considering First Aid's presence on a battlefield was only to lift out the dead and injured, he wasn't built to withstand a lot of damage.

He's too tired to move his hand once Sixshot noses into it again, so it lays limp and cool against the wolf mech's head. The implications of his presence and what had happened hasn't entirely sunk in, but he does remember some parts. Tarn, cornering him in the alley. The rest is... hazy.

He looks at the phase sixer at his side with the dim glow of his optics. What he can see of himself, he looks terrible.

"What happened?

Ambulon finds himself checking First Aid almost obsessively; monitoring his stats and checking to make sure that his replacement parts are integrating successfully.

He startles a bit when his colleague's optics flicker a bit in consciousness.

“First Aid… can you hear me?"

Should he tell? Sixshot peers quietly at First Aid's face, tired in a way he'd never before.

"Tarn." He pushes his head very, very gently under his friend's arm, rumbling quietly. "Tarn happened. He claimed you'd... 'exploited' him."

He'd been quietly wallowing in that for a long, long while, wondering if he'd been wrong to side against Tarn, wondering if he should have been mediating instead.

The problem was First Aid couldn't say and the doubt was eating him alive. He can't imagine First Aid being able to do much of anything to Tarn if the DJD commander didn't want it done but...

Damn his doubts.

"Yeah. Hey. Good to see you awake." Ratchet's fingers tighten back, very gently.

"You're gonna be all right. Still a lot of repairs to do, and I know you don't feel all right just now, but you're going to be fine."

Ambulon.

It warmed his spark to see his friend. First Aid realizes every day with Ambulon nearby was a gift, but right now he was feeling so very happy to see him. Part of him realizes he could just be dying; it wasn't uncommon for mechs to get sappy when the spark was weak.

"Mmm." It's a small confirmation. He's been in and out of wakefulness for a bit now. When you had medics hovering around you like a swarm of metal mites, there wasn't much to do besides rest.

First Aid is quiet for a moment, but he's trying to parse what that could even mean, fighting with a growing headache and the achiness of his body setting in. The warm tuck of Sixshot's head under his arm is a good distraction from just going to sleep again though.

When it clicks, First Aid laughs. It's an airy, painful sound.

"That's what this is about."

He does remember Tarn's anger. Some of the conversation was starting to click in his memory. At the time, he didn't really pinpoint the last straw being well... that.

"During... the outbreak, I found him. He asked for my help." He didn't have the energy to be embarrassed, but he had been. He regretted his actions when he ran into Tarn. A large part of him was ashamed. "I used my hands. I... insulted him. He was... embarrassed."

Then the shame does hit him like a shower of molten slag. He turns his head up at the ceiling. He hadn't really wanted to tell anyone that, but the way Sixshot had phrased it he was seeking an explanation. It wasn't one of his best moments, topped only by killing Pharma.

Funny almost dying over though. He figured it would have been something else, like finding out he was part of a spy network infiltrating them, or the closeness to Megatron, or his poorly hidden gross crush on the phase sixer near his side.

Of course he'd be fine. Ratchet has lost patients before, but there were reasons why he had a reputation for being so skilled. A cursory diagnostic check informed him what First Aid needed to know about his body, and while it didn't seem good, the only life concerning thing was the weak pulse of his spark.

"Spark pulse is weak," he croaks. "Should be feeding one canister of nucleon in to... increase rate."

He's not critiquing you, Ratchet. This was just second nature to him.

Edited 2015-11-26 05:23 (UTC)

"Yeah? I'll see if I can scrounge some up." Ratchet doesn't sound offended in the slightest, leaning hard in on his crutches to reach one hand up and smooth it carefully along First Aid's helm, gentle of the newly reconstructed patches. "Wasn't sure if I should, but you're the jump-start expert, not me."

There's a beat, and then the quiet sigh of air being filtered out of a vent.

He knows First Aid was just as high on pollen as everyone else had been during the event. He knows it personally had made he himself jump the freaking leader of the Autobots despite his own decidedly unkind feelings towards the Prime. He knows First Aid's and Tarn's history together enough to see why it would go down the way it had. Tarn's stance on the Autobots and peace had been made abundantly clear even before he'd tortured Drift.

Reason did little to unknot the complicated tangle of emotions.

He wants First Aid unhurt. He wants Tarn back.

"You sure know how to pick your fights," Sixshot complains quietly.

Edited 2015-11-26 18:29 (UTC)

[Ambulon reaches out, placing his hand over First Aid’s. He sees no point in not be honest with him.]

You had us worried…I wasn’t sure that you would make it when you were brought in. You’ve been making an incredible recovery.

[He squeezes gently, running his thumb over his his still injured knuckles.]

First Aid feels terrible about this. He doesn't even remember entirely what happened, but he can connect the dots. His face is still numb, so he's not even sure what kind of expression he's making, if any, and he struggles to control the skip in his spark pulse so it won't set off the life support alarms.

"I'm so sorry." His voice was laced heavier with static, not yet calibrated enough to show other inflections than neutral. "Since you met me, all I've done is make you sad."

Getting killed by the DJD seemed like an inevitable outcome to him. Between his history with spying on them, just in general being on Messatine, and then harboring some of the most renowned Decepticon traitors on his ship, it did stack up death by DJD fairly high. It made it easy to express his anger at Tarn.

He didn't stop in his anger to consider how it affected others though.

"We have..." First Aid starts, but then cuts himself off because did he hear Ratchet right? The jumpstart expert?

Ratchet was right that First Aid was going to give him a verbal lashing.

"Did you jumpstart me? Did you even take any--kffft--precautions?"

Did Ratchet ever read his essays on it? He was sure he had, which means he had no excuses for cutting corners. Jumpstarting was dangerous. You needed a compatible donor. The spark donor had to have a strong spark. Other options had to be explored first to ensure that the fading mech was stable enough for the surge and didn't just burn out. It was most effective on the unresponsive, rather than the crashing.

"That's not true." Sixshot's voice was quiet, the admission a little more than a whisper. "You make me happy, too."

It was more than he'd ever felt before. So strange that it took waking up on a desolate Cybertron to start feeling real again. Heh, that was kind of an over-dramatic way of putting it, but there wasn't... a better description for the transition. He'd never known happiness like this. He'd never known sorrow like this.

"I believed in him," he says quieter. "I didn't think he'd do this to you."

"Probably about as many as you did when you jumpstarted Fort Max," Ratchet admits, then draws in a shaking vent of air. First Aid would go through the logs anyway, it's not like not telling him things about the surgeries would do any good.

"It was... rough, for a minute. Your spark nearly guttered out completely, just before we got most of the leaks patched and your fluid levels stabilized. I didn't have time for much else, and it didn't knock me on my aft for long." His mouth tilts in a lopsided smile. "Megatron nearly passed out. But it was enough of a boost to keep you going until I was functional again and could finish, and he and Ambulon kept working in the meantime. It turned out all right."

Ambulon wasn't ever good for keeping secrets anyway, and when he tried usually First Aid could tell. He's nosy like that and working together so long meant that he'd learned Ambulon's particular... tics.

"I still can't feel my face."

Funny, on Messatine he had always found Ambulon kind of a gearstick. Getting away from Pharma's leadership did a lot for their friendship. He squeezes his hand, weakly, keeping it in his grip.

First Aid didn't really have all the optic components ready and repaired to show weeping, but his field ripples with it. He has his arm full of wolf head and he wishes he could hug it tighter, but his grip is fragile even as he tries curling his fingers around him.

He didn't have anything comforting to say to that. He never really believed that Tarn wouldn't savage him, especially after the mech had nearly crushed his neck cabling at the party, but at the same time he had the armor that Megatron's disappointment had afforded him.

"Really?" Because Sixshot had been there to see Tarn pick him up by the neck and slam his head into a table.

That was a warning sign First Aid should have probably picked up on, but at the time he was too drunk and hurt emotionally to really rationally assess his life may be in danger in the future.

Edited 2015-11-27 02:57 (UTC)

Which is definitely not enough precautions. His jumpstarting Max had been a gamble and had worked. He's been able to refine it since then, acknowledging he had taken a risk that happened to work out in his favor, but he wouldn't recommend those conditions again.

"Shouldn't knock you at all. Stupid. No sense." He's scolding you, Ratchet. He's grateful, but you make him worried, and the best way to channel his worry is to be angry.

"Come here, put your head here--" He manages to lift his hand after a moment, then lays it against his chest. "Listen."

Ratchet stares down at First Aid for a moment before he shifts on his crutches and leans in to lay his head against the half-repaired expanse of First Aid's chest armor. The plating is warm and his dims his optics for a moment, cycling his vents, his face turned away from First Aid's.

"You frightened me," he says quietly, no accusation in his tone, just a simple statement of fact. "We nearly lost you."

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