robothell | big dumb loser baby

big dumb loser baby

Who: Helex and whoever wants to look at his ugly mug.
What: Big angry sad confused Easy Bake Oven not sure how to handle the fallout.
When: Somewhen after Tarn dramas.
Where: WHEREVER WORKS REALLY. He's sort of out and about.
Warnings: Potential violence if you really annoy him? Otherwise not much honestly.

now.
Deep in a largely empty district somewhere in the city far from the crater – and so, in theory, far from other people – a building begins listing to one side. Dust and smoke drift up from the street in thick bursts and metal shrieks as it crumples.

Helex twists steel sheet and rebar in his massive hands and imagines it's his own neck. Actually tearing off his head won't do Tarn any good now… not that Helex was much good before either. He should have stepped in, he tells himself. It should be Helex in exile, not Tarn; Tarn could figure out a way to bring Helex back. The walking smelter has no such knack for planning and short of a one-bot rebellion, he can't see a way to make it work. Not that such a rebellion would work anyway, he thinks, tearing siding away from the underlying building frame. He could wipe out plenty of the bots here without too much trouble, maybe… but Megatron…

"Dammit," Helex snarls, rending the metal in his hands into scraps and shards. "Dammit!" He starts punching the frame with both large fists, a one-two battering ram that he just imagines is aimed at Megatron's face. He doesn't know what else to do. Attacking anyone outright without a plan will just end up with him dead or exiled, too, and he can't help Tarn that way. Girders start buckling under his frustration and he keeps pushing, punching, ripping away.

He shouldn't kill anybody if he wants to be useful to Tarn, no matter how much he wants them to suffer, but nobody said he can't tear apart decrepit old buildings as an outlet instead. As though it'd stop him if they told him he couldn't.

later.
Sullen and holding at a low simmer, Helex wanders grudgingly back towards civilisation. He's covered in dents and scrapes and finely powdered rust, his smelter is a little over half-full, his hands look like he just tried to box a Metrotitan, and he only feels the tiniest bit better. Wrecking inanimate structures is a mediocre substitute for the pure satisfaction of ending a life.

But he's tired, and hungry. And he can't really address either problem without coming back here.

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Ratchet knows it's probably stupid to be this far from home base right after the attack, but he can't spend all his time cooped up in the medibay, or so he's been told. It's even stupider for him to be alone, and this occurs to him abruptly as he watches Helex's intimidating bulk moving towards him. As he gets closer, Ratchet realizes that he's injured, and hesitates for a long, long moment. Well, it's not like he could run, unless he's banking on Helex getting distracted laughing himself to death to save Ratchet's plating.

"You look like somebody dropped half a mountain on you," Ratchet says, pitching his voice to carry and decidedly not moving to come closer. "What happened?"

He doesn't recognise the voice and wasn't exactly expecting anyone to try and interrupt him, so Helex pauses and looks around for the source, scowling. Preferably he can just spook them off and he won't have to deal with conversation because talking to any of the bots here, after everything that's happened recently, is even less appealing than the thought of having to live with them while Tarn wastes away outside the city.

Helex's gaze falls on one of the medics. Ratchet, he's pretty sure. He squints harder and his scowl deepens with open hostility and he stops where he is.

"What's it to you?" he rumbles, suspicious. Ratchet's out here alone and injured. Must be bait for some kind of trap so they have an excuse to throw Helex out, too. So he pointedly leaves the Autobot a wide berth and glares, smelter churning.

"Depends on if there's something out there big and mean and stupid enough to get into a fight with you and leave you looking like this."

Ratchet hesitates for a very, very long moment, watching Helex's face, before he huffs a slow stream of air from his vents.

"I can patch some of those leaks for you, if you want. Pop the worst dents. Up to you."

The offer of help just stokes Helex's suspicion. He makes a show of taking a full step back just so nobody who might be watching can call foul on him.

"You must think I'm stupid on top of hating me," he practically spits. The bitter taste of dross rises in the back of his throat as if underscoring his disgust. "Like you're just out here for no good reason and you're just gonna patch me up because why not. D'you think I haven't seen this trap before?"

"I don't hate you," Ratchet says, sounding faintly exasperated. "I'm out for a walk--I can't spend all my time locked in the medibay, whether there's still debris to be cleaned up from fistfights with your former boss or not. I'd patch you up because it's my job."

He tilts his head, optics narrowing, but he sounds faintly curious now. "What exactly am I supposed to be trapping you doing?"

Ratchet doesn't deny that he thinks Helex is stupid. That's practically the same as admitting it to the massive 'Con, who sneers and vents caustic gas as the metal in his smelter roils with his anger.

"All you have to do," he says knowingly, "is say I tried to hurt you. Whether or not I actually did won't matter. They'll believe you anyway." He firmly crosses both sets of arms. "And don't you feed me that 'it's your job' scrap or tell me you don't hate me. I'm not stupid." Never has he heard a greater lie, really, than someone saying they don't hate the D.J.D. It doesn't bother him, being reviled; it's the thought that anyone would expect him to believe otherwise.

"I never said you were," Ratchet says, but he's looking less alarmed and more thoughtful by the minute, shifting on his crutches and not moving away from Helex, leaving Helex to do as he pleases.

"It is my job, as it happens. And I don't hate you. I might not be thrilled about the Decepticon Justice Division as a whole and I confess to a little worry that you're going to get fed up with this conversation and beat the tar out of me, but neither of those things makes me hate you, nor would they mean I wouldn't treat you if asked."

"I told you not to spout those lines at me!" Helex booms, furious, and takes two steps towards Ratchet with his fists clenched before he catches himself and stops. The wretched little Autobot isn't even that scared; it rubs raw on his circuits. It's maddening. It's so hard to not just… grab him and rip him in half. Helex fairly trembles under the weight of impulse. He hasn't killed since he got here. The privation is almost nauseating.

But he can't fail Tarn like this.

He leans back, painfully slow; fumes and steam belch from his vents, and he works his fists loose again one finger at a time. His hands ache. He doesn't care.

"Stop. Lying," he adds, grinding his teeth on the words and imagining it's Ratchet's brain module. The thought helps, just a little.

Ratchet flinches, then curses himself immediately, blowing out a shaky vent of air.

"I don't know how to convince you I'm not. But if you don't want medical attention, I'm not going to try and make you sit still. ...I'm not going to try to make you do anything, or complain to anyone unless you actually try to rip another limb off. Please don't."

Ratchet's reaction is somewhat mollifying, but the words are still weird and confusing. It does ultimately steal the edge from Helex's rage.

"…Why wouldn't you be lying?" he demands, momentum faltering. Tension leaves his arms for the moment. No Autobot has any reason to be honest with him, after all.

"Lying is a waste of time and energy, neither of which I have a particular overabundance of." Ratchet appears to be giving Helex's question some serious thought.

"War's over, no particular reason to hold old grudges, and we're all stuck here with each other anyway. And I'm not interested in holding grudges. That's another waste of my time." He shrugs. "And, sure, fixing you specifically might not be in my job description, but I've never differentiated much. So if you want me to, I'll take a look, but I'm not going to fight you about it."

Helex's brow draws low as he chews over the answer. It sounds too easy, he thinks. Nobody is like this.

"That's stupid," he says. "You're stupid. Nobody says stuff like that. Nobody's that nice." He looms over Ratchet, smaller arms crossed, large hands on his hips. "Why should I believe a word of it?"

Ratchet huffs a soft laugh, more entertained than anything else.

"You sure as hell aren't the first person to call me stupid this week," he sighs, then shakes his helm. "And, I'm not nice. It's just practical. Believe it don't, it's no paint off my plating."

"…Why d'you care?" demands Helex, the furrow in his brow deepening further. Because Ratchet must care one way or another, or Ratchet wouldn't still be standing here talking about it. It's the wherefore of the thing – the reason he should care to press the issue when he admits it isn't his job to mind Helex's medical status – that Helex can't quite understand.

It bugs him. A lot. The molten metal in his smelting chamber roils along with his frustration.

Ratchet opens his mouth to say something snide before his extremely poor and tragically underutilized self-preservation instincts finally creak into gear and he pauses, then closes it again, appearing to seriously consider Helex's question--a good idea, since the huge smelter probably wouldn't even need all four hands to pull him apart like a strip of weak sheet metal.

He hesitates for a long moment before deciding on actual honesty.

"I don't know," he says, not sounding particularly perturbed by this fact. "I just... do. It's my job to see that people are well. I like to think I'm pretty good at it. Makes me feel useful. I just... like helping people, making something good where there wasn't before. When the people at hand aren't actively shooting at me or my friends, anyway, I guess." He cocks his head at Helex, curious.

"Does that answer your question?"

There are a lot of words in that answer. And they'd make sense strung together like that if it made any sense for Ratchet to want any member of the D.J.D. well. Helex frowns.

"No," he rumbles, all four fists tensing, "not really. 'I don't know I just like helping people' is a lousy answer because I'm me. That means you're stupid, crazy, or waiting for me to let my guard down so you can cross-wire something as soon as I let you near my systems. Or some combination of those."

It's logical to Helex, at least. Wait for the enemy to relax, then strike.

Ratchet's optics brighten as he manages not to grin, settling into his crutches and regarding Helex thoughtfully.

"Well, you're not the first person to call me crazy this week, either," he says mildly. "Look--I swore an oath. To the Autobot cause, sure, whatever the hell that even means anymore, but one before that, more important than that." Ratchet's chin lifts, his jaw tightening and his optics sharp--he doesn't look amused at all, now.

"I might shoot you in the chest with a gun, but I wouldn't stab you in the back with a scalpel. Four million years of enforcing equal care for Decepticon P.O.W.s and a long enough time running free clinics for empties in the slums before that and you think I'm going to turn around and use my medical skill to off you on some fake pretext? You haven't pissed me off that much, Helex. Or at all, except to imply that I'd do something like that. Call me stupid or crazy all you want, but I'd never deliberately harm someone I accepted as a patient. It's not who I am."

He eases his too-tight grip on the handles of his crutches and lets too-warm air out of his vents on a rattling sigh, relaxing deliberately. He is stupid, to get this riled up over a situation he can't really do anything about, ultimately. It's not like he really expects to change Helex's mind. He shrugs, half-turning away.

"Anyway, whatever. Like I said, you don't have to believe me--it's not like I'm going to try to jump you to seal those leaks. But come by the medibay later if you want. Nobody there is going to hurt you if you come there looking for help, not on my watch."

Helex glowers at Ratchet but decides against keeping him from leaving and beating a better answer out of him. None of what he says actually makes much sense, but they don't seem to think along the same lines, either. Helex bets Tarn could make sense of it if Tarn were here.

But he's not, and Helex has to figure things out for himself now.

He lurches forward a step then stops, fists clenching at his sides in alternating pairs. He's still angry, still not really satisfied. And irritated. He starts following Ratchet.

"I'm not scared of anybody hurting me," he says, insulted at the idea. "Just 'cause I don't want anybody taking shots at me doesn't mean I'm scared of it, okay?"

"Yeah, that seems reasonable," Ratchet says, slowing a little to let Helex catch up and looking up at him sidelong. "Still. It's not how we operate, either way. And I know you guys have Megatron, but he's not trained up a hundred percent, and I also know that Spinister is wherever Tarn is right now and not really available for house calls."

He looks up at Helex, a little harder this time, his optics focused.

"Why are you so set on me being out for your plating? I'm not trying to piss you off, honest."

"Don't you talk to me about Tarn!" Helex snaps, and nearly makes a grab to force Ratchet to turn around and look at him. He stops himself at the last second but his hands twitch all the same. He's still angry. He may never not be angry.

If Ratchet's really not trying to tick him off, it isn't working so well.

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big dumb loser baby

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