robothell | More Medibay Shenanigans

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More Medibay Shenanigans

Who: Megatron, Aftermath, Rodimus, Ratchet, Nautica maybe more?
Where: le Medibay
When: The week after the pissbabies punch each other
What: Post checkup bonding and other assorted things
Warnings: Descriptions of robo doctoring and medicine

Day 1: Megatron only stayed in the medibay as long as his chemical cleansing kept him from leaving. The first time, it was a few hours that Ratchet's ghastly mixture anchored him to the building. No unusual adverse reactions - well, save for the bad mood he was in at basically being instructed to sit and do nothing for an afternoon when he wanted to help.

There'd at least been a spare datapad to occupy his time. Sentinel was still unconscious, not that he'd make much of a room partner either way. Staring at the little device in his hand, he found himself beginning to write.

It's been a while.

Day 2: Follow up. It was after the first dose that he was informed he'd need to continue the same treatment for the rest of the week. Well over a million years of consuming barely-edible fuel left it's mark on his internals.

He decided to stay longer that day, even after the feeling of his innards liquidating subsided into something still irritating, but manageable. It was in his second meeting that Megatron realized he didn't have to be here only as a patient - and well, that rekindled an old hope for him for something he nearly thought impossible. Ratchet certainly seemed to care about him in some bizarre way, so he'd see how far he could go with this.

Helping the two doctors clear out more rubble and obstructive debris from deeper in the building seemed like a good place to start. A little discomfort wouldn't stop him from working.

Day 8: Finished with the regimen, Megatron found himself feeling exceedingly light and agile. It was difficult to describe. When he'd first entered, he certainly didn't feel impaired in any way - barring some of the damage from being riddled with Sentinel's plasma blasts. He would be fine if he'd just said no to Ratchet's solution and just continued without it.

But this was a different altogether, everything inside seemed to mesh and move as if it were freshly built. His transformation cog would sing rather than merely.. function. He wasn't sure how long this feeling would last - but something about it made him want to approach one of the doctors, for reasons that have been building up for the past few days.

He found himself making his way to visit the familiar room where he'd always met with Ratchet for the past week, as if expecting him to always be there.

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The first time Aftermath steps into the infirmary, it's to try and arrange for some personal medical supplies from the personnel there. He's known that Megatron had been going in a few hours every day for some treatment regarding his long-term exposure to poor quality energon.

He hadn't really been expecting the sight of Sentinel bloody Prime laid out on the berth there though. That gave him a bit of a spark flicker, that did.

Spotting Megatron on the other berth, the old truck warily makes his way over, giving Sentinel a proper amount of space. Better safe than sorry.

"Megatron." There's possibly some unnerved tones to his voice. "Sorry to interrupt your writing, but am I actually hallucinating or is that Sentinel Prime over there?"

Megatron had been so absorbed with the little datapad in his hands that he hadn't noticed Aftermath's entrance into the room. The last few days had been quite eventful, and there was plenty to get down in words - but the old truck's voice does break his concentration.

A cold anger still seeps into his expression at the sound of Sentinel's name, but he puts the datapad back down on the berth to give Aftermath his attention.

"He's been unconscious for a while now."

And Megatron still hadn't quite picked all the metal shavings of the Prime's armor out of his tank treads.

The coldness in Megatron's voice draws Aftermath's visor back onto the young mech. It occurs to him briefly that, perhaps, it wasn't Sentinel Prime that he should be worried about.

He stops that thought in its tracks, examines it quietly for a moment.

"... I don't want to assume, Megatron," Aftermath begins carefully. "But you wouldn't happen to have had any involvement with his current state of being, would you?"

Megatron notices Aftermath's very sober hesitation in his voice. It was a stark contrast to when they'd first met, and he wasn't sure how he felt about it.

On the one hand, he disliked being pegged with a reputation from a future that hadn't happened yet. On the other, he couldn't entirely blame Aftermath for being cautious after hearing the heinous actions he'd come to accept.

"Yes, I'm the reason he's lying there, his attempt to 'quash me' didn't go as he planned."

"When you faced him, you had a good amount of gladiator training behind you and some appropriate upgrades from the Constructicons."

Aftermath watches him for a long few seconds, trying to sort out his thoughts.

There's an old, survivalist and paranoid part of him that screams at him to leave. Megatron was still Megatron after all, and perhaps no amount of dissuading would stop him from becoming the tyrant he had the makings to be. Aftermath should cut off his ties and leave for safer grounds while he still had the time.

... Instead, he reaches out, placing a gentle, concerned hand on the young miner's shoulder, strangling the quiet panic before it poisoned the rest of his mind.

"You should be more careful."

Aftermath is allowed a glimpse of weariness from Megatron as the hand rests on his shoulder. The formula's effects may have been getting to him, but he was absolutely right.

Megatron was entirely sure a good portion of what decided that fight was Sentinel's own arrogance and a little luck in terms of location and what he could find around him. He was hardy, sure, but he was no gladiator.

"What I should be is more thankful the doctors here didn't turn me away. Both Autobots, with every reason not to trust me. I'm still not certain why."

"I think you proved yourself to Red Alert already." Wry amusement colors his words as he recalls the rather rocky meeting with the head of the clinic.

"As for Ratchet, well," Aftermath leans against the side of the berth. "I have quite a few stories from other soldiers talking about a doctor who'd helped them when they'd ended up in the Dead End slums."

"Mind you, 'Ratchet' is a rather common name for their lot." Giving Megatron's shoulder a firm pat, the old truck's visor lights up in a smile before he turns to go hunt down a chair. "I wouldn't go around assuming he was the one they spoke of."

Bit of a survival tip there, youngster.

"He did mention having clinics the Dead End, actually," shortly after Megatron may or may not have been ready to punch the doctor through a few walls. Ratchet had managed to defuse the situation, fortunately.

"But we can never be sure, I suppose."

He notices Aftermath sidling up to him with a chair, and gives the old soldier an intrigued look. Well, Ratchet did tell him that the side effects weren't going to pass for another few hours.

A little company aside from Sentinel would certainly be a nice change.

"If you thought you were getting away from me after not telling what happened," Aftermath puffs indignantly at the look Megatron gives him, but there was no real heat behind his words.

He plonks the chair down and settles in it, stretching his legs out with a soft sigh. Folding his hands over his massive chest, the old mech turns to peer over Megatron in quiet contemplation for a moment.

"There's not a single lick of electronic data storage units I've found that's survived whatever happened to this city," he rumbles. "Nothing. Not even the materials that should've been protected by Faraday cages."

Megatron sees the opportunity to change the subject and very much takes it. He wasn't quite in the mood to get an earful about his meeting with Sentinel.

"Perhaps it was the people who lived here. They could have chosen to erase them all at once and leave before the attack came."

Knowing an overwhelming invasion force was coming to their city? He could understand some sort of information-based nuclear option.

"If it were pre-evacuation, it would make attempts at coordinating an evacuation quite a bit more difficult. If it were post evacuation..." Aftermath frowns, taking a moment to sort out his thoughts.

"Any information storage system that is created with the ability to destroy entire parts of its network like that in one go doesn't seem to be a very practical or smart feat of engineering." Companies would have small systems like computers which stored data individually, data then backed up onto servers for mass storage which was then backed up off-site, possibly in multiple places. "Not to mention any attempts at destroying data on such a scale would be met with a lot of disagreement. It would be impossible to coordinate after an evacuation."

Shifting slightly in his chair, Aftermath rests his cheek against his knuckles, looking rather put upon. "Regardless of what has happened, the most common source information we're left with is graffiti. I'm afraid I'm not terribly hip with the lingo however."

"It's possible there were ways of transferring the data elsewhere - to a ship or some other offworld location - and destroying the copy here. They could have wiped the city so that whoever attacked it wouldn't get the information."

He settles back into the berth, getting comfortable in the old soldier's company.

"But we're also both making assumptions without knowing much of anything about these people and their circumstances."

Edited 2015-01-21 22:18 (UTC)

"That is true. All the better reason to get familiar with graffiti lingo." He does bring up a little note-taking software and makes a memo to investigate that idea later though.

"That said, I have not found personal servers or storage devices protected similarly just yet. I doubt such information would be destroyed in any kind of city-wide shut down." That would be more up to the owner of the information rather than any government body. "Then again, I am still assuming these particular Cybertronians would have a lot of personal information to save."

Maybe they just didn't have personal anything and lived more like eusocial races did. The graffiti seemed to point to something of a negative on that point though. There was certainly some individual expression going on.

Red Alert had done a pretty good job getting the clinic up and running, but taking it from 'makeshift' to 'fully functional' would require a little longer, and a little more expertise in fixing the kind of machines that weren't alive.

Nautica had taken it upon herself to rewire the building. Having cables running along the floor meant someone could trip and disconnect life support, or get a jolt of power in a way that wasn't quite what one wanted in a recharge.

That rather than any love for dark, rusty, enclosed spaces was why she was crawling around in the ceiling. When she accidentally put her weight on a panel whose anchor bolts had corroded through, it was just Megatron's bad luck to be directly underneath the falling sheet of metal. It was almost followed by a falling Nautica, but she caught herself in time, hanging head first halfway out of the new hole in the ceiling and blinking in consternation. She had of course managed to keep a solid grip on her wrench, which was glowing in a fashion much like a torch and much unlike a wrench.

"Oh! Hi, Megatron. ...And sorry."

Having a piece of ceiling suddenly drop on Megatron's head was certainly a good way to put a halt the sentence he was writing. A good helping of dust coats his helmet as the panel bounces and slides it way to the floor. He's quick to wipe the screen of the datapad before looking up.

"Nautica?"

He stands up off the berth, setting the datapad away from the area where the panel fell.

"Do you need help?"

"No, I've got it." Nautica had streaks of rust and grease and less identifiable things on her plating, but at least this time she had her visor down, so her face was clean. "Just running new wiring. The crawlspace up here would be iffy for a mech your size, anyway." He was offering to help her with her work, not with that minor 'dangling upside down a good 50 feet off the floor' problem, obviously.

She switched off the light on her wrench, since she didn't need it right this second. "Are you okay? What are you doing in the medibay?"

Nautica seems like she's handling herself fine up there, but he's going to stay underneath her in case something else slips and she loses her footing. Or whatever she was using to stay attached to the crawlspace.

"I'm fine. Ratchet is... trying out some sort of treatment," a hand rests on his helm,"Something to clear out the residue from low grade energon rations."

He avoids mentioning his scuffle with Sentinel. The Prime's unconscious body and his own not quite smoothed over and formerly bullet ridden armor would be evidence of that. He just didn't want to talk about it.

Nautica's unusual degree of obliviousness protected Megatron from having to explain himself just yet; she hadn't noticed his new damage or Sentinel's presence.

"Oh yeah, the low-grade stuff is full of contaminants. It'll gunk up your systems something awful," she agreed, wriggling backwards into a position that involved less precarious swinging in empty space, but more mess smeared across her legs and chest. "Similar principle to doing an engine flush, I assume. ...Except whatever Ratchet gave you won't dissolve your fuel tubing. Don't go around drinking industrial solvents."

Wait. That came out wrong.

"Not meaning to imply you would. But some people might and I don't want to get into the habit of being unclear on that kind of thing." After all, she remembered Rodimus' self-dismemberment plan. Drinking engine cleaner didn't seem out of the question.

Nautica added the warning like something similar to this has happened before. Though, given some of her other crewmates...

"I wasn't planning to," he sits back on the berth as she gathers herself back into a secure spot.

"Whatever Ratchet gave me does a good enough job of making my systems feel so... permeable," he adds, finding it difficult to be particularly verbose while the next wave of nausea decided to pass through his system.

Nautica folded her arms at the edge of the hole and rested her chin on them, her HUD springing to life to magnify Megatron's face, since they were so far apart with him lying on the slab down there. Sprawled in the ceiling crawlspace of a clinic on a ruined Cybertron in another universe, talking to a time-displaced linchpin of history, nbd.

"You are looking a out of it, now that you mention it." She might not have noticed right away if he hadn't mentioned it. "Don't worry, the stuff I'm refining is strictly high-grade. Energy-dense and meets every purity metric. No substandard fuel on my watch."

"Remind me to thank you for that." His tone seems to lighten a little as the sensation passes.

Picking up the datapad again, he scrolls through what was written before looking back up at the displaced engineer.

"I'm curious, how did you come to decide that quantum engineering is what you wanted to do? How does the process work on Caminus?"

"I really like starship work. Libraries don't go fast enough." Nautica shrugged, a flash of the yellow of her impeller blades visible for a moment against the darkness of the crawlspace. "You pretty much follow where your aptitude takes you, except..." She paused and pressed her lips into a thin line, thinking about the worse parts of Camien life. "We don't have much wiggle room as a society, just in terms of keeping ourselves going, so you have to contribute. It's not usually a problem, though. Nobody wants to be dead weight."

Megatron didn't forget what Nautica said about the resource crisis on Camnius. Similar to the energon shortage on Cybertron, he imagines, minus the stringent addition of Functionism. He doesn't expect a planet in crisis to be ideal, but it seemed like a massive step up from what he's known.

"But it's based on what each individual chooses, then? What they show promise in. Not what is assumed to be their talent because of how they were created."

"If you're asking about Functionism, I don't think Caminus himself would have put up with that." His word wasn't law, at least not on social issues of that kind, but it still carried enormous weight.

"You can wash out of a field by not being good enough at it, of course, but it's not based on altmode or anything..." Nautica trailed off for a moment, gaze going distant as she thought through the possibilities she'd never actively considered before, "though I guess if you wanted to do something that required an aerial altmode when you only had wheels, or some other mismatch like that, you'd be out of luck. We don't have the resources to go around doing reconfigurations for non-medical reasons."

She stopped and chewed her lip for a nervous second. He was asking about construction methods, too, and his future self had been really touchy about that.... "I, um, know it's a sore subject, but...all Camiens are forged. 'How we were created' isn't a consideration."

Ratchet, for his part, is still figuring out what to do with this strange new person he feels like he should hate. He knows it's unfair to blame everything that happened during the war on someone who doesn't remember, to take out any frustration and grief he has on someone who wasn't at fault, even if he only strictly wasn't at fault yet. And he knew how much Megatron had captured Orion's curiosity, back when.

It was just that Ratchet hadn't expected to like him quite so well.

So when Megatron had insisted on hanging around at the medibay and helping to set things up, Ratchet hadn't argued--just accepted, and gave him short jobs, and kept things as polite and professional as he could while he observed. He noticed his treatments were working, too, and that was an uncomplicatedly good feeling. His optics brighten a little as he watches the spring in Megatron's step as he comes into the medibay.

"Feeling better, are we?" His voice is dry, but warm, his optics flicking over Megatron clinically. "Told you."

Although he'd repeated this little routine several times over the past week, Ratchet's fine-tuned attentiveness still caught him a little off guard.

The medic was right, of course. He felt better than he'd had in cycles. He didn't need to confirm or deny that, the tests confirmed that enough if his physical fleetness didn't. So, standing a few paces away, he mentally reviews how he had roughly planned to approach the question.

"You went out of your way to be this thorough. I'm not sure why, but I wanted to thank you regardless."

Ratchet shrugs a little, eyeing Megatron thoughtfully.

"It's my job," he says slowly, knowing that's not really an explanation. "...you're my patient. If I'm going to agree to treat you, I'm damn well going to do whatever's in my power to get you into proper working order, not do things by halves. I don't do it for thanks."

"No, of course not, but I'm more than happy to give it to you regardless."

Ratchet's answer didn't ring entirely true with him. He was one of very few medics he'd met in his life, but he seemed to behave on something beyond the mere call of duty.

"But I want to give more than that. More than just a thanks - or physical strength," he gestures to Ratchet,"I want to help Cybertronians like you can."

Edited 2015-01-19 03:38 (UTC)

Ratchet looks at Megatron, a little incredulous.

"Well," he says slowly, "I mean, I can teach you basic first aid--that shouldn't be too difficult. Honestly, in an environment like this, it's stuff most people should know. It shouldn't take too long to give you the basics."

A little doubt was something he could work with. It was difficult to contain the strange sort of eagerness at Ratchet's tentative acceptance.

"It's very possible that we'll be stuck here for some time to come."

He pauses, almost sheepishly,"If I show promise with the initial training, I'd like to continue it."

Ratchet just stares for a few seconds, a distinctly odd and not-very-pleasant feeling of deja vu swamping him briefly.

"I don't think that's a good idea," he says, his mouth tugging up helplessly at one corner, though he hauls it back down as soon as he can. It's not like this Megatron would understand why he thought it was funny. "I'm not sure you have the, ah. Patience."

"Patience."

Megatron tries not to dwell on Ratchet's restrained smile - which he very much noticed.

He was quite serious about this.

"I spent the last million years drilling into Cybertronian bedrock for a living. You don't think that requires patience?"

"You said it, not me," Ratchet mutters, cycling his vents in a sigh and pinching briefly at the bridge of his nose.

"Look. I'll try and teach you if you want, but I'll be honest with you--I don't think you have the temperament for it."

He was about to contest what it is apparently he said until Ratchet, essentially, said yes.

Megatron swallows his pride for that moment and just nods.

"A chance is all I ask for."

Ratchet watches Megatron's frustrated expression for a long moment before he sighs and leans back against a medical slab, still watching him.

"Why do you write?" he asks, an apparent non sequitur, but his optics are narrowed thoughtfully.

Well, that was certainly a question, wasn't it?

Looking back, he actually hadn't written much of anything after what happened on Messatine. Partial Shadowplay or no, the very experience of being strapped to a berth with Trepan... changed him.

It got easier and easier to come to the conclusion that he didn't need more words, he needed action. Violent action. Yet, here, he found himself going back to the pen. Revising, revisiting.

"If a single datapad can convince the Senate to try and kill me, then I know my voice is being heard."

"Well, yes," Ratchet says, inclining his head. "But why you're writing in the first place--the subject matter. I've read it, some of it. You cover a lot of ground, but at least some of it is because good mechs are suffering and dying around you and its senseless and cruel and you can't stand it.

"Megatron, that's what this job is. At least part of the time. Most of it, sometimes. You sit, and you wait, and you stare at things you should be able to fix, and you watch decent people die for stupid reasons, or for no reason, which is worse. That's literally what they're paying you for--it's not just inevitable, it's expected." Ratchet blows warm air from his vents in a sigh. "No political treatise or regime overthrow will change that.

"I'm not telling you it's not a good idea because I think you're not smart enough or physically capable of doing the work. I'm telling you because it's obvious that being helpless makes you miserable."

His gaze hardens at that.

"No, it wasn't uncommon to know someone who'd just lost something that was easily replaceable, easily reparable, and watching them slowly accept their new, more laborious and miserable existence."

"But it wasn't because the injuries were irrecoverable, it was simply because their supervisor didn't quite value a worker's life enough to give them a chance. It was because cutting off their rations and replacing them was cheaper in some bureaucrat's logbook than convincing a doctor to fly over to a hole in the ground on a barely colonized planet. That is the senseless cruelty I despise."

"I'm not naive. I'm well aware you're not a miracle worker, but what you do is far from what I'd consider helpless."

"I was a combat medic for four million years," Ratchet says, his own voice fierce. "You think I didn't have to make some of those calls? Leave mechs to die because I wasn't sure I could save them so I could move onto someone who had a better chance to pull through? All those deaths were senseless cruelty, every last one of them, on my head, because it was my job."

He subsides after a minute, the fight leaking out of him slowly, leaving him tired and drained.

"You are," he says finally. "Naïve, I mean. And I'm telling you that I often am helpless, that's the point of this. But you're also stubborn as hell, so fine. Not like we can't use more hands around here."

"It's different," he adds, just as stubbornly as Ratchet just mentioned.

"Needing to make a difficult call because you are forced to isn't the same as not valuing someone's life enough to even consider helping them. You would have tried if you had the chance."

But, in the end, Ratchet essentially conceded and gave him what he asked for, so he settles back and calms down.

"When do you want to begin?"

"Of course it's different," Ratchet snaps. "You're assuming that makes it easier. It doesn't."

He shakes his head and heroically resists the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose.

"What do you want to learn first?"

Edited 2015-01-21 19:33 (UTC)

He doesn't argue that point - he has no idea how easy or difficult this was going to be. But he was certain whatever it was would be a better outcome than the future that was described to him.

"You mentioned starting with first aid. Would it be different otherwise?"

He'll follow your lead there, Ratchet. He's the student in this.

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