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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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)

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.

"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."

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)

"Yes. No." He knew Tarn wanted First Aid dead. But Tarn was supposed to respect Sixshot's connection with First Aid the same way Sixshot had respected his connection with Pharma. Tarn was supposed to be taking care of Megatron, putting Megatron's will and well being before his personal desires.

He didn't care about Sixshot's end of the unspoken deal. He didn't care about being Megatron's mentor as much as Sixshot thought he did, willing to throw compromise and patience under the truck to enact vengeance.

Surely, Tarn had foreseen this outcome? If not the execution, then the exile at the very least. If he hadn't expected to get caught, then he knew that Sixshot would grieve.

Did Tarn even care about that?

"I wanted so badly for us to coexist somehow." Sixshot nudges his muzzle against First Aid's side. "It didn't have to be perfect. I was so naive."

"That's not... wrong." It was naive, but First Aid could imagine the sentiment behind it.

He feels that way about a number of things. He does want peace, even if it was hard. He wanted Decepticons and Autobots to blend. But he had his limits, and the DJD were that limit. He would have left Tarn to burn out in that field of pollen if he had more control.

"Is he... alive? Where is he?"

"He's been exiled. Ratchet intervened before Megatron could execute him." The fact that he felt any kind of relief at Tarn's life being spared just sent him spiraling deeper into the mounting guilt.

"I should have been the one holding the sword." He was still playing the part of Megatron's hound when that was the last thing this young mech needed. "I should have killed him. Megatron's hands would be clean and Tarn would never have been a threat ever again."

Sixshot could still go out and do just that. He could leave this moment, track the scent and blow a hole clean through Tarn's head, quick and painless.

"Kffft." The sound of static from his vocalizer was a good summary for First Aid's feelings about that.

A hazy memory helped First Aid's anxiety at the moment. He might feel more aprehensive about Tarn being alive, unwatched, and at large once his memories of the events become more clear. Distantly, he knows it's worrying. He knows his life is still in danger, now for the insult of the outcome of his failure to kill him, only now Tarn just had nothing to lose for finishing it. But...

He didn't want Megatron to be a killer. He was angry. He was hurt and has had a hard, short life, but he can be good.

"Is that what you want?" It's a simple question, one he already knows the answer to. Tarn and Sixshot had shared something he and Sixshot never had. Might never have.

"..." The silence probably answered that a lot better than any words could have. No, Sixshot did not want to hunt down his ex-lover. Despite all the pain he'd had caused, he still, desperately, wanted Tarn to live.

"If he comes back here, I will kill him," he concedes unhappily.

That, at least, was true. It was Megatron's wish. It was to protect First Aid. It was to maintain peace. The next time Tarn attempted to hurt anyone else would be his last attempt.

"I'm going to be taking up the role of teaching Megatron to fight. There's no one else left and we need Megatron at his fullest. I suspect this is only the beginning of whatever is about to come."

He wants to go back to sleep. The escape of dreams seemed like a pleasant alternative to the ache in First Aid's spark, deeper than physical.

"Megatron's a medic." He has his stripes and everything. They'd helped teach him, watch him grow into something he wanted to be, rather than what the Senate and war forced him to be. Why did everyone want to train him to be a killer?

His hands brush over the sides of Sixshot's face, nudging him softly to lift his head and look at his scarred, gray face.

"Sixshot, why are you here with me?"

"He will still be a medic." That was was a promise he intended to keep. Megatron was not their leader: he was a young mech with his own hopes and dreams and it was something he'd failed miserably at acknowledging before, merely acting as a follower doing as he was told. Something Tarn had ignored entirely in favor of attempting to groom him. "He's just one with more enemies than usual."

The gentle nudging of First aid's hands makes Sixshot's optics brighten slightly in puzzlement, but he lets his head be guided. Staring up at the scarred face, he feels exhaustion sinking into his struts all over again.

He should have been there. He could have stopped it.

"I was... worried."

First Aid sighs, softly holding Sixshot's head gently between his hands. He gets tired quickly, his grip going limp but not moving, trapping Sixshot's head in a loose hold against his chest.

"Do you want to be with him?" Tarn, that is. Getting mauled has made him reflective on the situation. He feels...okay enough to ask about it now, but already his tank was starting to knot.

"Why? So he can lie to me again?"

There's a vindictive and deep bitterness in those snarled out words. Initially, he bristles in First Aid's hold, suddenly angry all over again.

Eventually, however, the growls die down and the bristling turns into silent, suppressed tremors, just barely detectable. He doesn't say anything for the longest time, careful to keep the weight of his head off of First Aid's chest.

"I don't know what I want. I mostly just want to be pissed off but it's hard to sustain."

Those tremors were right under First Aid's hands though. He was weak, aching, glitching, but his hands were still sensitive. Sixshot was hurting.

He'd wanted to talk to Sixshot about this for some time now. The small discussion they'd had when they were both inflicted with feverish charge, when the wound of rejection was still open and fresh, wasn't really quite a discussion. It ended in a short dalliance, one First Aid would have traded to go back to the way things were before.

He wishes things were different.

"Loving someone hurts." His voice doesn't sound like it's getting better. It actually sounds like it's getting a bit worse, with fluctuations in volume and static levels. "But it's also wonderful. It just... has to be worth the pain. You have to decide that."

"If the worth of Tarn's love is your life, I think I'll pass," Sixshot rumbles dryly. "It's not a particularly fair trade-off."

The tremors fade slowly as the Sixer regathers his composure. Eventually, hesitantly, he speaks up again. "... I'm sorry. About not telling you what was going on between me and Tarn."

"I'm just an Autobot." It's humor, but it's dark.

First Aid takes a moment to debate his response to that. He'd been very, very hurt by it. Finding out in the way he did probably was one of the worst ways he could think of, shy of actually walking in on them. His EM field reflects this, pulsing uneasily.

"I forgive you." Saying anything else would be too much, or a lie.

"An awful snarky one, too." There's very, very soft puff of air against First Aid's chest.

First Aid's forgiveness doesn't make him feel any less guilty, but it takes some of the weight off. He debates trying to explain himself more, but the words just taste like excuses on the back of his tongue. In the end, he simply turns his head and gives First Aid's hand a gentle lick.

"You should go back to sleep."