"You're not going to get far in a medibay if you're squeamish," Ratchet says mildly, watching Megatron wipe his hands, but he relents almost immediately and his optics turn sharp and curious.

"You could have, you know. I'm frankly a little surprised you didn't. You've been talking to a lot of Autobots. You could've decided that we were all biased and Tarn is a freak outlier and you waged a just war and we're all lying in the interests of self-congratulatory historical revision. You don't know--you haven't lived through it yet.

"...look," he says, cycling his vents roughly. "I meant what I said to Rodimus. I'm not interested in--in punishing you for something you haven't done yet. It's pointless on top of being fundamentally unsatisfying, even if there wasn't a you here I could blame in perfect comfort from the moral high ground. And for what it's worth, I'm pretty sure you were at least partly yanking Optimus' chain when you said those things to him." Ratchet shakes his head. "There's a reason things turned out so... badly. A lot of reasons. And I won't knowingly lie to you about what happened. ...but there's also a reason Orion Pax liked you so much when he first met you. I'm just starting to see what that reason is, I guess."