robothell | [ THE "DRIFT GOT HECKED UP BY TARN" CATCH-ALL POST ]

"And yet," Ratchet says, pulling his hands back and wrapping them around the handles of his crutches, wet with energon and oil as he limps slowly around to the other side of the stretcher, nudging Megatron out of the way with an elbow before he settles in again. His face is unreadable and his voice is oddly heavy as he reaches down again, hands curling against Drift's ruined plating, the space where his leg should be still a weird emptiness, unbalancing him.

"Here we are."

Megatron steps back as Ratchet nudges him, feeling an inescapable urge to contest the determinism implied in that. He still had time to change things, there was still an opportunity to go another path, one where he properly brought reform to Cybertron - without resorting to a cruelty worse than what they'd initially fought.

But he couldn't wax poetic about his plan to change their world when Ratchet was still missing a leg, and was bringing someone he clearly cared about from the brink of death, elbow-deep in their own energon.

What could he say?

"It won't happen again."

Ratchet barks a short laugh, not unkind, his optics flashing.

"Damn right it won't," he says, shaking his head. "You know, you told Optimus to his face you weren't sorry. Looked right at him when we had you captured and trussed up in the belly of a ship hurtling through deep space and there was not a lot keeping us from chucking you out an airlock, and you told him you only regretted that you hadn't done more. That all the killing wasn't enough. Murder on an industrial scale, you called it, because you liked it." Ratchet's expression shifts, calcifying, his hands moving ceaselessly. "You told him you learned to hate in a cell like that one.

"And, you know. For all your lack of understanding--for all your disbelief and confusion--you haven't called me a liar. You haven't refused to believe it's true."

"It seems that being inflammatory is something that I never ended up tossing out," he looks acridly at the energon smeared across his arms - from Ratchet's contact, as well as his own with Drift. There was a growing compulsion to wipe it off. He looks around the tool set.

"And what the hell did you expect me to do, by the way?" he remarks, a growing indignance entering his voice,"Unless every Cybertronian on this planet decided to collaborate together in some massive lie," he bends down on a knee after finding the first box empty,"I doubt-"

There's a metal clang as a tray is jostled onto the floor as he reaches inside, making him sigh in exasperation. All of this equipment was so small. He reaches for the wipe anyway, his irritated cycling of air filling the silence.

As the energon is cleaned off, he relaxes himself, and stands back up,"The evidence is right in front of me. I'm not going to run away from the truth just because I don't like it."

"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."

"Not just Autobots," he adds, holding his chin thoughtfully,"Neutrals. Defectors. Other Decepticons. Nearly all with their share of terror, or anger at what I'd do to them - and what I'd bring to Cybertron."

Megatron tosses the wipe into a nearby bin, solemn and a little melancholy,"Ratchet, I'm a lot of things. Some of those things aren't the best, and I look at them and see the future I'm constantly reminded of. The seeds of something terrible."

He lowers his hands out of his sight.

"But I'm not delusional. And I certainly don't believe in fate. So if I'm given a warning like this, I'll correct my path and make the most of it."

"Huh." Ratchet only sounds a little bitter. "Glad someone around here has an idea of what responsibility looks like."

Drift is mostly stable now, but there are still minor repairs to do. Ratchet works in silence for a few minutes.

"Look," he says suddenly. "I never really got a chance to explain about why I turned Tarn away. I mean--this is partly why, because he does things like this. But it's not all of it. ...it's not even most of it. And Pharma--he's here now. You should probably be briefed, if nothing else, in case he shows up here."

Ratchet's voice is oddly flat, scraped thin by a kind of pain that just leaves him looking tired and a little resigned.

"I joined up with The Lost Light originally because my hands were failing," he says quietly. "I could barely hold a glass, let alone..." He gestures with an elbow down to what he's doing, his jaw working briefly. "I wanted to find a new CMO, since I was about to be completely useless, and I thought Pharma was it."

"Pharma?"

Megatron looks at him, hovering just out of Ratchet's way in case he needed something out of reach. He's quiet as Ratchet begins to explain, watching his hands glide in a well-practiced manner.

"They don't have limb replacements on the Lost Light?"

Not that he was unused to that kind of situation - Manual class were always one accident away from being tossed to grinder. Whatever you were born with is all you had.

But he expected an Autobot ship to be better than that. At least, these versions of the Autobots.

Edited 2015-02-13 18:26 (UTC)

"Not these limbs," Ratchet says. "Not for me. A medic's hands... they're fine instruments, irreplaceable. Once my hands went, I was done. For good. And there were weirdly consistent statistics of patient deaths from Delphi, where Pharma was stationed." He looks up at Megatron now, still finishing a weld. "In the heart of the DJD's territory. On Messatine.

"So, we got there and everyone was dying of this... plague. First Aid was stationed there too. Drift and Pipes were with me. They both got sick, some Decepticons attacked, but eventually it all came out that Tarn had been forcing Pharma, under pain of torturing and killing everyone on the base including another medic name Ambulon who was a forme Decepticon, to kill patients so he could supply Tarn with t-cogs. He's addicted to transforming and has refused treatment before, that's why he needed so many. He burned them out."

Ratchet actually has to stop, his voice very steady but his vents rattling slightly.

"Pharma had gotten away with it as long as he could, but he eventually ended up cooking this rust virus, to take the whole place out and cover it up so nobody would know that he'd been first deliberately letting patients die, then killing them, to keep Tarn from... doing whatever he was going to do if Pharma refused. I came down with the plague--it was very fast-acting--and Pharma tried to kill me before I infected him. I managed to get the antidote from him and knocked him off the side of a building to let him hang there when he almost shot me to death." Ratchet's hands settle, flat and still, against Drift's too-cool plating. "Drift managed to somehow haul his tattered, leaking carcass up to the roof and chop off Pharma's hands to let him fall before he could take me out." He shrugs, not looking at Megatron, or even at Drift, but staring almost numbly down at the backs of his palms.

"So I took them. I needed them--especially then, with a bay full of rusted leakers that needed treatment. But Pharma--" He does look up at Megatron now, his face drawn and set. "We went to school together. He was good, he might have even been the best. But Tarn gave him an impossible choice to make, and it broke him. It's as much Tarn's fault as it is anyone's that he's dead."

Megatron is silent as Ratchet tells the story, hearing the hurt in Ratchet's voice at the whole debacle, seeing the way he has to stop and stare at his hands. Pharma's hands.

He feels his own spark fill with remorse at having allowed Tarn in the Medibay, even though Ratchet insisted to him it wasn't his fault. He should have been more careful rather than assume the Decepticon would listen to him because of who he was.

It pained him to see Ratchet like this. Forced to take something invaluable from a close friend because Pharma was shattered by the stresses caused by what would become his own creation. It was easier to say to never get attached than to actually practice it.

The guilt is clear in his optics, even if his voice is steady,"Walk me through the repairs, I can help you patch him up."

The doctor was clearly suffering deeply from this, and its the least he can do to amend the damage.

"Yeah. Here," Ratchet says--but the second he's not completely focused, he can feel exhaustion sweep in like a tide, threatening to drown him. "Just--I'll finish the bigger stuff. But--"

He cycles his vents shakily, his voice worn thin as he tries not to waver on the crutches.

"Look. I don't turn people away from my medibay for fun, or because I don't like them." He snorts a laugh, though there's no humor in his face. "I spent a few hours reattaching your legs pretty recently. What a mess that was. Just."

His hands still briefly, one of them shifting to cover the crude Decepticon badge scrawled into Drift's chest.

"If I turn someone away, it's for a reason. Just please stay clear of Tarn, all right?"

[ THE "DRIFT GOT HECKED UP BY TARN" CATCH-ALL POST ]

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