[IDW] Lost and Lonely Space 03/12
Nov. 15th, 2018 06:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dracoqueen22a/n: Commission fic for Cosmicdanger!
Title: Lost and Lonely Space
Universe: IDW, Pre-Death of Optimus Prime
Characters: Ratchet, Deadlock, Alien Original Character(s)
Rating: M
Enticements: Sticky Sexual Interfacing, Canon Divergence
Description: While on a sabbatical from the war, Ratchet runs into a spot of trouble that lands him in close company with a familiar face, the famed Decepticon Deadlock.
chapter three
Ratchet doesn’t know what’s worse.
That when Deadlock slumps in the chair, clearly unconscious, Ratchet doesn’t hesitate to rush to his aid. Or that he’s worried about the notorious Decepticon and actually cares to make sure he survives this.
Or maybe he’s thinking too hard.
Ratchet glances at the console, confirms there’s some kind of auto-navigation system activated, and hurriedly unbuckles Deadlock from the seat. He has to disconnect the Decepticon from the console, and it angrily blats at him, but stays their course. Whatever their course is.
There’s a pool of energon on the chair and the floor beneath Deadlock. There’s a hole in his back, his side, his abdomen. The wounds are ragged and burned, and a sickly, poisonous stench rises from the blastershot in his back. Damn the Pentas and their propensity to test new weapons tech on a near-constant basis.
Ratchet hauls Deadlock up, throws him over a shoulder, and sloughs him back to the tiny compartment that serves as a recharge room in this shuttle. There’s really not much here, but it’s the only place Ratchet can lay out the Decepticon that’s not the floor. From that point, it’s rote.
If there’s one thing Ratchet still remembers how to do, it’s being a medic. He cleans and welds and patches and growls when he realizes he’s going to have to put Deadlock through a fluid flush in order to clear his system of whatever the Pentas pumped into him.
Ratchet doesn’t think too hard about what he’s doing. He throws a mesh over the Decepticon badge on Deadlock’s chestplate. He knows it’s there, but at least it doesn’t stare back at him.
“We’ve gotta stop meeting like this, kid,” Ratchet sighs as he works and works, only occasionally glancing out the windshield to make sure they aren’t in danger of colliding with anything, out here in the emptiness of space.
He doesn’t know why he’s giving it all to save the spark of a single Decepticon, one who intended to buy him from the Pentas no less. He just knows that he can’t not, and before the war, before having to choose between one patient and the next, saving sparks is what he did. Saving sparks had been his purpose.
It should have been his only purpose.
Hours later, Deadlock is stable, and Ratchet stumbles out of the small compartment. He slumps against a cabinet, blinks out of his medic haze, and focuses on himself for the first time. He chugs one of the cubes of energon from their stock, and addresses the damage to his own frame. Thankfully minor, but he can’t just ignore it.
He keeps his sensors trained on Deadlock, not only because he’s a bit concerned about what other effects the poison might have, but also because Deadlock probably won’t online feeling friendly. Ratchet wants some advance notice before he gets a blaster to the face. He had, after all, pointed a weapon at Deadlock before their rapid exodus from the trading station.
Ratchet stares at his reflection in a shiny panel and fingers the collar around his neck. There’s no obvious mechanism to disengage it. Given the tiny device that had activated a large bomb, he’s loathe to just snap it off. It might be the last thing he ever does.
He pushes off the cabinet and staggers back into the bridge. He drops into the pilot’s chair and stares blankly at the console. Exhaustion tugs at every line, every strut, but he can’t offline here. Someone on this ship needs to be alert, and right now, it’s certainly not Deadlock.
Ratchet frowns. Where are they even? There’s nothing out the windshield but stars. The ship seems to be moving forward, probably set to auto-pilot, but there’s no destination set in the nav. At least, not one Ratchet can see anyway. He tries poking at the console, flicking a few switches, pressing a few buttons, but nothing responds.
The whole thing’s been locked.
Frag. Damn distrusting Decepticons.
“That’s pointless, you know. It’s only going to recognize me.”
Ratchet glances over his shoulder. Deadlock slumps in the doorway of the recharge room, leaning heavily on the frame, one arm slung across his abdomen. His optics are dim, and even from here, Ratchet can detect the raggedness of his ventilations. But he’ll live.
“I noticed,” Ratchet replies and swivels back to the console. He shifts, and grimaces. Damn. He’d forgotten about the spill of energon from Deadlock’s wound. “You should be in the berth.”
“Yeah. That’s not gonna happen.” Deadlock drags himself forward, free hand using the wall and equipment to stabilize himself. “Get the frag out of my chair.”
Ratchet slants him a sideways look. “You could be politer to the mech who saved your spark.”
“Cause you did it out of the kindness of your spark?” Deadlock snorts. “It was self-preservation. You don’t get kudos for that.” He grips the back of the second chair and glares. “Out.”
Ratchet leans back and folds his arms over his chassis. “If you think you’re capable of making me, you’re welcome to try.”
Deadlock rolls his optics and slumps into the navigator’s chair, still holding his abdomen. It probably hurts, but Ratchet doesn’t have the pain chips to spare, and besides, Deadlock’s likely a masochist anyway. Most Decepticons are.
“What the frag are you doing out here anyway?”
Ratchet swivels back around in the chair, relaxing as much as he can with a deadly Decepticon next to him. And the tackiness of drying energon beneath his aft. “I’m on vacation.”
“Seriously.”
“I am serious.”
Deadlock barks a laugh, only to hiss and curl inward when he does it. “Frag, that hurts,” he mutters, and tips his head back against the chair, rolling his face toward Ratchet. “And your idea of a vacation is ending up with the Pentas?”
“That wasn’t part of the plan.”
“Yeah, they never are.” Deadlock lurches upright and withdraws a cable with his free hand, shaking a little before he manages to connect to the console. “You’re not getting out of here without me, so don’t go thinking about killing me in my recharge.”
Ratchet chuffs a vent. “If I wanted to kill you, I wouldn’t have bothered saving your spark.” He points an accusing finger at Deadlock. “If there’s anyone who ought to be worried about getting offed in their recharge, it’s me.”
“If I wanted you dead, it would’ve been easier to leave you to the Pentas,” Deadlock says with a side-eye.
The console powers up, switches flickering to life, and the background hum cycles up into a background rumble. The HUD display flashes into view as does the holo-nav map, not that peering at it does Ratchet any good. He has no idea where they are.
“Then we’ve established neither of us is going to kill the other. Good to know.” Ratchet drops his elbow onto the arm of the chair and props his chin on his knuckles. “So is this a thing Decepticons do now? Buy Cybertronians for spare parts?”
“Better us than them.” Deadlock flicks several more switches, and the holomap spins around in a dizzying manner, struggling to pinpoint their location.
Ratchet doesn’t look at it or Deadlock. Instead, he stares out the windshield at the stars because they’re all he can see. No planets or moons, just stars for lightyears around. It’s as much disconcerting as it is comforting.
He’d forgotten how very empty space could be.
“Oh, yes. How noble of you,” Ratchet drawls. “Thank you for saving me from a horrible fate. Truly, I ought to give you a medal.”
“If you’d have been Neutral, you’d have been given the opportunity to join us,” Deadlock points out.
Ratchet lifts his orbital ridges and rolls his gaze toward Deadlock. “And if I’d said no?”
Deadlock doesn’t dignify that with an answer. He pretends full focus on the holomap and whatever his fingers are doing, while the other continues to cup his abdomen. Ratchet’s done a great job with the patch. No energon’s leaking through, so it must be a subconscious gesture, to protect what’s considered a weakness.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Ratchet says with a snort. He slumps a little further in the chair and cycles a ventilation.
Silence descends, tense though it is. Ratchet’s relieved they haven’t started shooting each other yet. Then again, in a space this small, it wouldn’t be wise for anyone hoping to survive. A single stray shot could take out the nav-comp or the auto-pilot or the steering system or anything of import.
This unspoken truce is all they have to keep themselves alive right now.
“How long you been on vacation anyway?” Deadlock asks, and there’s something snide in his tone, something that ruffles Ratchet’s plating. “You’re Prime’s CMO, and there’s no chatter about you being missing.”
“Because I’m not.” Ratchet hauls himself out of the chair with a creak of hydraulics that shouldn’t feel as old as they do. Thank Primus he’d seen a small washrack in his earlier poking around. “They might not know exactly where I am, but I’m not missing. Or at least, I won’t be, given the fact I’m going to miss my check in soon.”
He rummages through their meager supplies and produces a cube of low-grade for Deadlock. They’ll have to be frugal, unless they catch an orbit around a sun to process some solar grade. It’s another reason not to fight.
Deadlock shakes his head. “It still doesn’t make any sense. A vacation in the middle of a war? Can you imagine Shockwave taking one?” He makes a derisive noise.
Ratchet grinds his denta and counts backwards from ten. He stands between the two chairs and shoves the cube into Deadlock’s face. “It wasn’t my idea.”
He doesn’t get a thank you.
“But getting captured by space pirates was part of the plan?”
“Of course not!”
Deadlock snatches the cube and flicks it open with one thumb. “Autobots,” he snorts. “You’re lucky I’m the one who found you. I’d have taken you to Megatron. You’d have been a prisoner.”
“Or worse.” Ratchet drops back down in the chair. It squeaks ominously beneath him. The shuttle continues to drift aimlessly. He eyes the communication console and wonders if he can hack it.
Deadlock tips his head back and guzzles the energon in the space of two vents before he tosses the empty cube over his shoulder. It clatters somewhere against the far wall. “Worse is what those pirates would have sold you to. Trust me.”
Ratchet grimaces. “If it’s not obvious by now, I don’t.”
Deadlock’s head rolls toward him, optics narrowed to amber-red slits. “Want I should find their nearest hideaway and drop you off? Let you try your luck with them again?”
“Want me to accidentally nick a central line and see how quickly you bleed out?” Ratchet retorts with a raised orbital ridge.
The air crackles between them. Their fields clash, angry and bitter more than anything else, which Ratchet’s glad for. He doesn’t want Deadlock to sense the guilt layered beneath it.
If he’d only done more, perhaps Drift wouldn’t have become… this.
“What’s the plan?” Ratchet asks, once the silence drags on too long, and they’re accomplishing nothing by sitting here glaring at one another.
Deadlock shifts to face forward, fingers flying across the console. His clamped armor and withdrawn field reflect the tension vibrating between them. The holomap stills from the rapid cycling and zooms inward, focusing on a single, blinking icon.
“We’re here,” he points out.
Ratchet squints. “In the middle of nothing.”
“Yep.”
“Frag.” There’s really no other word to use. They’re in an escape shuttle, for Primus’ sake. It doesn’t have nearly the range of a full-fledged ship. And no doubt they’d used all they had for that one jump.
“Yep,” Deadlock pops the glyph and taps a few more keys, causing the holo-nav to swirl across the stars and focus on a cluster of bright icons. “The absolute closest point of neutrality is the waystation in the Hyades Cluster. There’s an asteroid belt or two in the way, but it’s a few weeks journey if we’re lucky. Death if we’re not.” He shrugs.
Asteroid belt. Fan-fragging-tastic. That’s not going to be difficult to pilot through or anything. They’re in a shuttle. It’s a boat with all the maneuverability of a tank.
Ratchet braces an elbow on the chair and leans closer to the map. “What else?”
Two taps and the image smears off to the left. “The Sol System is over this way.” Deadlock’s tone is perfectly bland, bored even. “That’s a couple months at the limping pace we’ve got – the quantum engine’s all outta juice by the way – but it’s a clear path if you don’t count the estrix.”
“The what?” Ratchet frowns, racking his processor, but unable to find any data on anything similar to the weird garble of syllables Deadlock had just spat out.
“Estrix,” Deadlock repeats, and his forehead crinkles. “Huge spacefaring energon-suckers?”
Ratchet gives him a blank look because he’s never heard of the estrix and strongly suspects Deadlock is making them up.
“Like a scraplet only ten times bigger and hungrier?” Deadlock continues, making a vague gesture with his free hand, his forehead lines growing deeper and deeper, his voice inching into incredulous.
Ratchet waits for him to get to the point.
Deadlock mutters a curse and turns back to the console. “Well, they exist. I guess Autobots are too homebody to realize there are more dangerous things out in the universe than a handful of Decepticons.” He snorts. “Anyway, Estrix are mean. They’re the size of the average mech, and when they’re out of juice, they go into stasis until they smell some fresh meat. We’d be easy pickings for ‘em.”
Ratchet glares at the holo-map. “Then it’s not a clear path.”
“Depends on what kind of chances you want to take.” Deadlock shrugs, his tires bobbing, but the motion is far from casual. Pain leaks into his field.
Ratchet considers the pain chips in his medkit, but they only have so many, and he’s not feeling that charitable yet. He stares at the map again, searching for something, anything that’s a viable option. He spies a bright, spiral cluster, off to the far right.
“What about that?” he asks, pointing.
“Electronic deadzone,” Deadlock says, sounding bored. “Nothing that requires a circuit functions there, including us. It’s not even a bit of an option.”
Ratchet spits out a curse before he can swallow it down. “How the fragging frag did we end up so far from everything?” he demands, fist making a light tap on the arm of the chair.
Deadlock leans back in his chair, cupping his midsection. “I didn’t have time to chart a course. The warp drive dropped us in the nearest exit, and that’s all the charge it has. Pit, we’re lucky we even know where we are.”
“Lucky,” Ratchet repeats, and kicks out a foot, narrowly missing the bottom of the console. “Some fragging vacation.” Stuck on a tiny emergency shuttle with an angry Decepticon. Oh, yeah. This is real relaxing.
Deadlock has the audacity to laugh, though he follows it with a vented hiss. “Ain’t it though?” The smile on his lips is far from friendly. “Looks like it’s you and me, Autobot. Stuck in this tugboat together, trying not to kill each other. Fun, fun.”
Fun.
Not bloody likely.
Ratchet glares at the holomap, the blinking icon that is their ship in the middle of nothing, and their complete lack of options. They could be rational or they could be reckless.
Ratchet gnaws on his bottom lip, indecision warring within him. He eyes Deadlock. “How skilled are you at piloting this thing?”
“I get by.”
Ratchet stares at the holo-map, at safety that is within reach but a long time away, or a great risk that’ll get him to safety a lot faster. “Skilled enough to get through an asteroid field or two?”
Deadlock lifts an orbital ridge, lip curled in a sneer. “That eager to get away from me already? And here I thought we were becoming friends.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Ratchet says, flattening his tone as much as he can manage. “Can you do it or not?”
Deadlock rolls his shoulders. “I can give it a try. If that’s the action you think is best.”
Ratchet sits back in the chair and sets his jaw. “I think this vacation is a bust, and we need to get back where we belong. Before I kill you.” Or vice versa.
“Aye captain,” Deadlock drawls and throws out a sarcastic salute. He tilts his head. “But before we can go anywhere, that’s gotta come off.” His free hand points right at Ratchet’s intake.
He touches the collar. “You have the key?”
“I have a key,” Deadlock says, and fishes around in his subspace, pulling out a small rectangular object and giving it a wiggle. “That there collar is a Penta tracking device and bomb, the latter of which is just enough to take off your head, if they feel so inclined.”
Well, at least he’d been right to be cautious.
Ratchet folds his arms over his chassis. “Then why are you willing to take it off? Seems to me that’s something you could hold over my head?”
Literally.
“Because I’m not interested in some stray Penta ship picking up on its signal, and figuring out who’s to blame for that trading frag-up.” Deadlock rolls his optics and shifts in the chair, finally lifting the hand over his abdomen to gesture to Ratchet. “So come here so I can take that off you.” He pats his lap pointedly.
Ratchet’s lip curls. “No thanks.”
“You’d rather have a bomb around your neck?” Deadlock asks.
“I’d rather not have to debase myself for a bit of freedom,” Ratchet snaps.
Deadlock rolls his optics and heaves himself out of the chair, moving toward Ratchet’s. “Only a mech who’s never had to bite and claw his way toward an ounce of it would say that.” He touches the rectangular remote to the collar around Ratchet’s neck, and it abruptly disengages with a flash of heat against Ratchet’s plating. “Must’ve been nice.”
Ratchet eases the collar off his neck. “Is it still active?”
“Not while it’s unlatched.”
He tucks the collar-slash-bomb into his subspace. One never knows when something could be useful, especially given that they are floating in the middle of empty space. “Is that what the Decepticons mean for you? Freedom?”
“I don’t think that’s any of your business,” Deadlock says, his tone tight, losing that antagonizing flavor.
Ratchet looks up at him, into amber-red optics that are narrow slits of warning. “So I’m just supposed to pretend I don’t know who you used to be? And what you could’ve been?”
“I was a leaker on the streets, and you saved my spark to make yourself feel better about it,” Deadlock bites out, and anger flashes in his field, but not quick enough to disguise the shame broiling thick and black beneath it. “There’s nothing to pretend because the past doesn’t matter.”
Ratchet twists his jaw. “The past always matters. It’s what shapes us. We’re not strangers, Drift.” He uses the mech’s former designation pointedly. Just because he’d let Megatron rename him into this creature, doesn’t mean the mech he used to be has vanished.
Deadlock’s ventilations audibly crackle. “Aren’t we?” he demands, and it’s with a flexing of fingers into loose fists. “You didn’t save anything back then. You just sent me back out into nothing. I needed saving then, I don’t fragging need it now.”
“Right,” Ratchet drawls. “Because turning into a killer courtesy of the Decepticons is an improvement.”
“I’m fighting for something. There’s a difference,” Deadlock bites out, his tone edged with a growl, his field aggressively filling the small compartment. “And since you became a pawn for the Autobots, I don’t think you have any room to talk.” He pauses, tilts his head, grinning with sharpened denta. “Then again, you’ve always been the Senate’s pawn, haven’t you?”
Ratchet stands, because like frag Deadlock is going to take that tone with him while he’s sitting down like an errant new-spark. “I’m no one’s pawn. I chose the Autobots because it was the right thing to do. Because your boss and his army were tearing their way through everyone and someone had to stop him before he destroyed everything.”
“Yeah, you did a swell job of that,” Deadlock snaps. “Don’t act like the Autobots are free of sin. You’ve destroyed as much as we have.”
“For lack of a better word – you started it. Megatron chose violence, and when diplomacy failed, we responded in kind.”
“Diplomacy. Right.” Deadlock snorts and his field contracts again, sharp and hot and bitter. “It must have been easy for you, living in your tower, to look down on us and decide what we should have done to save ourselves. It’s easy to judge when you already have it all, isn’t it?”
Ratchet chuffs a vent. “That’s an excuse. You wanted this. Megatron wanted this. Violence and death and power, that’s what it’s about. Because if it wasn’t, you wouldn’t have felt the need to pretend to be someone you’re not. You wouldn’t have to hide behind ‘Deadlock’.” He rolls his optics. “You talk about freedom, and then you let Megatron give you a chain, because you hate yourself, you hate who you are, Drift. And that’s no one’s fault but your own.”
Fury rages in Deadlock’s field. It has a tangible presence against Ratchet’s armor, and he almost reels in the face of it.
He shoves a finger at Ratchet and hisses, “Don’t call me that. Drift is dead. That useless leaker is dead. And that’s the way he’s going to stay.” He whirls around, stomping past the two seats on the bridge. “I’m going to recharge. I’ll get the alert when we get close to the first belt. Until then, leave me the frag alone.”
The door to the recharge room rattles shut with a definitive clang that does nothing to dispel the heat of Ratchet’s glare. He’s angry and he’s disappointed, and he’s not sure who both of those emotions are meant for first. He slumps back down into the chair, scrubbing his face with his palm, the taste of Deadlock’s shame and outrage heavy on the edge of his field.
The ship chugs steadily onward. Ratchet can’t call the pace brisk. At best, they are trudging toward their destination. Maybe they can make it through the rings of asteroid belts to rejoin their factions on the other side. More likely, it’ll get them killed.
Honestly, Ratchet doesn’t know which is worse.
~
Title: Lost and Lonely Space
Universe: IDW, Pre-Death of Optimus Prime
Characters: Ratchet, Deadlock, Alien Original Character(s)
Rating: M
Enticements: Sticky Sexual Interfacing, Canon Divergence
Description: While on a sabbatical from the war, Ratchet runs into a spot of trouble that lands him in close company with a familiar face, the famed Decepticon Deadlock.
Ratchet doesn’t know what’s worse.
That when Deadlock slumps in the chair, clearly unconscious, Ratchet doesn’t hesitate to rush to his aid. Or that he’s worried about the notorious Decepticon and actually cares to make sure he survives this.
Or maybe he’s thinking too hard.
Ratchet glances at the console, confirms there’s some kind of auto-navigation system activated, and hurriedly unbuckles Deadlock from the seat. He has to disconnect the Decepticon from the console, and it angrily blats at him, but stays their course. Whatever their course is.
There’s a pool of energon on the chair and the floor beneath Deadlock. There’s a hole in his back, his side, his abdomen. The wounds are ragged and burned, and a sickly, poisonous stench rises from the blastershot in his back. Damn the Pentas and their propensity to test new weapons tech on a near-constant basis.
Ratchet hauls Deadlock up, throws him over a shoulder, and sloughs him back to the tiny compartment that serves as a recharge room in this shuttle. There’s really not much here, but it’s the only place Ratchet can lay out the Decepticon that’s not the floor. From that point, it’s rote.
If there’s one thing Ratchet still remembers how to do, it’s being a medic. He cleans and welds and patches and growls when he realizes he’s going to have to put Deadlock through a fluid flush in order to clear his system of whatever the Pentas pumped into him.
Ratchet doesn’t think too hard about what he’s doing. He throws a mesh over the Decepticon badge on Deadlock’s chestplate. He knows it’s there, but at least it doesn’t stare back at him.
“We’ve gotta stop meeting like this, kid,” Ratchet sighs as he works and works, only occasionally glancing out the windshield to make sure they aren’t in danger of colliding with anything, out here in the emptiness of space.
He doesn’t know why he’s giving it all to save the spark of a single Decepticon, one who intended to buy him from the Pentas no less. He just knows that he can’t not, and before the war, before having to choose between one patient and the next, saving sparks is what he did. Saving sparks had been his purpose.
It should have been his only purpose.
Hours later, Deadlock is stable, and Ratchet stumbles out of the small compartment. He slumps against a cabinet, blinks out of his medic haze, and focuses on himself for the first time. He chugs one of the cubes of energon from their stock, and addresses the damage to his own frame. Thankfully minor, but he can’t just ignore it.
He keeps his sensors trained on Deadlock, not only because he’s a bit concerned about what other effects the poison might have, but also because Deadlock probably won’t online feeling friendly. Ratchet wants some advance notice before he gets a blaster to the face. He had, after all, pointed a weapon at Deadlock before their rapid exodus from the trading station.
Ratchet stares at his reflection in a shiny panel and fingers the collar around his neck. There’s no obvious mechanism to disengage it. Given the tiny device that had activated a large bomb, he’s loathe to just snap it off. It might be the last thing he ever does.
He pushes off the cabinet and staggers back into the bridge. He drops into the pilot’s chair and stares blankly at the console. Exhaustion tugs at every line, every strut, but he can’t offline here. Someone on this ship needs to be alert, and right now, it’s certainly not Deadlock.
Ratchet frowns. Where are they even? There’s nothing out the windshield but stars. The ship seems to be moving forward, probably set to auto-pilot, but there’s no destination set in the nav. At least, not one Ratchet can see anyway. He tries poking at the console, flicking a few switches, pressing a few buttons, but nothing responds.
The whole thing’s been locked.
Frag. Damn distrusting Decepticons.
“That’s pointless, you know. It’s only going to recognize me.”
Ratchet glances over his shoulder. Deadlock slumps in the doorway of the recharge room, leaning heavily on the frame, one arm slung across his abdomen. His optics are dim, and even from here, Ratchet can detect the raggedness of his ventilations. But he’ll live.
“I noticed,” Ratchet replies and swivels back to the console. He shifts, and grimaces. Damn. He’d forgotten about the spill of energon from Deadlock’s wound. “You should be in the berth.”
“Yeah. That’s not gonna happen.” Deadlock drags himself forward, free hand using the wall and equipment to stabilize himself. “Get the frag out of my chair.”
Ratchet slants him a sideways look. “You could be politer to the mech who saved your spark.”
“Cause you did it out of the kindness of your spark?” Deadlock snorts. “It was self-preservation. You don’t get kudos for that.” He grips the back of the second chair and glares. “Out.”
Ratchet leans back and folds his arms over his chassis. “If you think you’re capable of making me, you’re welcome to try.”
Deadlock rolls his optics and slumps into the navigator’s chair, still holding his abdomen. It probably hurts, but Ratchet doesn’t have the pain chips to spare, and besides, Deadlock’s likely a masochist anyway. Most Decepticons are.
“What the frag are you doing out here anyway?”
Ratchet swivels back around in the chair, relaxing as much as he can with a deadly Decepticon next to him. And the tackiness of drying energon beneath his aft. “I’m on vacation.”
“Seriously.”
“I am serious.”
Deadlock barks a laugh, only to hiss and curl inward when he does it. “Frag, that hurts,” he mutters, and tips his head back against the chair, rolling his face toward Ratchet. “And your idea of a vacation is ending up with the Pentas?”
“That wasn’t part of the plan.”
“Yeah, they never are.” Deadlock lurches upright and withdraws a cable with his free hand, shaking a little before he manages to connect to the console. “You’re not getting out of here without me, so don’t go thinking about killing me in my recharge.”
Ratchet chuffs a vent. “If I wanted to kill you, I wouldn’t have bothered saving your spark.” He points an accusing finger at Deadlock. “If there’s anyone who ought to be worried about getting offed in their recharge, it’s me.”
“If I wanted you dead, it would’ve been easier to leave you to the Pentas,” Deadlock says with a side-eye.
The console powers up, switches flickering to life, and the background hum cycles up into a background rumble. The HUD display flashes into view as does the holo-nav map, not that peering at it does Ratchet any good. He has no idea where they are.
“Then we’ve established neither of us is going to kill the other. Good to know.” Ratchet drops his elbow onto the arm of the chair and props his chin on his knuckles. “So is this a thing Decepticons do now? Buy Cybertronians for spare parts?”
“Better us than them.” Deadlock flicks several more switches, and the holomap spins around in a dizzying manner, struggling to pinpoint their location.
Ratchet doesn’t look at it or Deadlock. Instead, he stares out the windshield at the stars because they’re all he can see. No planets or moons, just stars for lightyears around. It’s as much disconcerting as it is comforting.
He’d forgotten how very empty space could be.
“Oh, yes. How noble of you,” Ratchet drawls. “Thank you for saving me from a horrible fate. Truly, I ought to give you a medal.”
“If you’d have been Neutral, you’d have been given the opportunity to join us,” Deadlock points out.
Ratchet lifts his orbital ridges and rolls his gaze toward Deadlock. “And if I’d said no?”
Deadlock doesn’t dignify that with an answer. He pretends full focus on the holomap and whatever his fingers are doing, while the other continues to cup his abdomen. Ratchet’s done a great job with the patch. No energon’s leaking through, so it must be a subconscious gesture, to protect what’s considered a weakness.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Ratchet says with a snort. He slumps a little further in the chair and cycles a ventilation.
Silence descends, tense though it is. Ratchet’s relieved they haven’t started shooting each other yet. Then again, in a space this small, it wouldn’t be wise for anyone hoping to survive. A single stray shot could take out the nav-comp or the auto-pilot or the steering system or anything of import.
This unspoken truce is all they have to keep themselves alive right now.
“How long you been on vacation anyway?” Deadlock asks, and there’s something snide in his tone, something that ruffles Ratchet’s plating. “You’re Prime’s CMO, and there’s no chatter about you being missing.”
“Because I’m not.” Ratchet hauls himself out of the chair with a creak of hydraulics that shouldn’t feel as old as they do. Thank Primus he’d seen a small washrack in his earlier poking around. “They might not know exactly where I am, but I’m not missing. Or at least, I won’t be, given the fact I’m going to miss my check in soon.”
He rummages through their meager supplies and produces a cube of low-grade for Deadlock. They’ll have to be frugal, unless they catch an orbit around a sun to process some solar grade. It’s another reason not to fight.
Deadlock shakes his head. “It still doesn’t make any sense. A vacation in the middle of a war? Can you imagine Shockwave taking one?” He makes a derisive noise.
Ratchet grinds his denta and counts backwards from ten. He stands between the two chairs and shoves the cube into Deadlock’s face. “It wasn’t my idea.”
He doesn’t get a thank you.
“But getting captured by space pirates was part of the plan?”
“Of course not!”
Deadlock snatches the cube and flicks it open with one thumb. “Autobots,” he snorts. “You’re lucky I’m the one who found you. I’d have taken you to Megatron. You’d have been a prisoner.”
“Or worse.” Ratchet drops back down in the chair. It squeaks ominously beneath him. The shuttle continues to drift aimlessly. He eyes the communication console and wonders if he can hack it.
Deadlock tips his head back and guzzles the energon in the space of two vents before he tosses the empty cube over his shoulder. It clatters somewhere against the far wall. “Worse is what those pirates would have sold you to. Trust me.”
Ratchet grimaces. “If it’s not obvious by now, I don’t.”
Deadlock’s head rolls toward him, optics narrowed to amber-red slits. “Want I should find their nearest hideaway and drop you off? Let you try your luck with them again?”
“Want me to accidentally nick a central line and see how quickly you bleed out?” Ratchet retorts with a raised orbital ridge.
The air crackles between them. Their fields clash, angry and bitter more than anything else, which Ratchet’s glad for. He doesn’t want Deadlock to sense the guilt layered beneath it.
If he’d only done more, perhaps Drift wouldn’t have become… this.
“What’s the plan?” Ratchet asks, once the silence drags on too long, and they’re accomplishing nothing by sitting here glaring at one another.
Deadlock shifts to face forward, fingers flying across the console. His clamped armor and withdrawn field reflect the tension vibrating between them. The holomap stills from the rapid cycling and zooms inward, focusing on a single, blinking icon.
“We’re here,” he points out.
Ratchet squints. “In the middle of nothing.”
“Yep.”
“Frag.” There’s really no other word to use. They’re in an escape shuttle, for Primus’ sake. It doesn’t have nearly the range of a full-fledged ship. And no doubt they’d used all they had for that one jump.
“Yep,” Deadlock pops the glyph and taps a few more keys, causing the holo-nav to swirl across the stars and focus on a cluster of bright icons. “The absolute closest point of neutrality is the waystation in the Hyades Cluster. There’s an asteroid belt or two in the way, but it’s a few weeks journey if we’re lucky. Death if we’re not.” He shrugs.
Asteroid belt. Fan-fragging-tastic. That’s not going to be difficult to pilot through or anything. They’re in a shuttle. It’s a boat with all the maneuverability of a tank.
Ratchet braces an elbow on the chair and leans closer to the map. “What else?”
Two taps and the image smears off to the left. “The Sol System is over this way.” Deadlock’s tone is perfectly bland, bored even. “That’s a couple months at the limping pace we’ve got – the quantum engine’s all outta juice by the way – but it’s a clear path if you don’t count the estrix.”
“The what?” Ratchet frowns, racking his processor, but unable to find any data on anything similar to the weird garble of syllables Deadlock had just spat out.
“Estrix,” Deadlock repeats, and his forehead crinkles. “Huge spacefaring energon-suckers?”
Ratchet gives him a blank look because he’s never heard of the estrix and strongly suspects Deadlock is making them up.
“Like a scraplet only ten times bigger and hungrier?” Deadlock continues, making a vague gesture with his free hand, his forehead lines growing deeper and deeper, his voice inching into incredulous.
Ratchet waits for him to get to the point.
Deadlock mutters a curse and turns back to the console. “Well, they exist. I guess Autobots are too homebody to realize there are more dangerous things out in the universe than a handful of Decepticons.” He snorts. “Anyway, Estrix are mean. They’re the size of the average mech, and when they’re out of juice, they go into stasis until they smell some fresh meat. We’d be easy pickings for ‘em.”
Ratchet glares at the holo-map. “Then it’s not a clear path.”
“Depends on what kind of chances you want to take.” Deadlock shrugs, his tires bobbing, but the motion is far from casual. Pain leaks into his field.
Ratchet considers the pain chips in his medkit, but they only have so many, and he’s not feeling that charitable yet. He stares at the map again, searching for something, anything that’s a viable option. He spies a bright, spiral cluster, off to the far right.
“What about that?” he asks, pointing.
“Electronic deadzone,” Deadlock says, sounding bored. “Nothing that requires a circuit functions there, including us. It’s not even a bit of an option.”
Ratchet spits out a curse before he can swallow it down. “How the fragging frag did we end up so far from everything?” he demands, fist making a light tap on the arm of the chair.
Deadlock leans back in his chair, cupping his midsection. “I didn’t have time to chart a course. The warp drive dropped us in the nearest exit, and that’s all the charge it has. Pit, we’re lucky we even know where we are.”
“Lucky,” Ratchet repeats, and kicks out a foot, narrowly missing the bottom of the console. “Some fragging vacation.” Stuck on a tiny emergency shuttle with an angry Decepticon. Oh, yeah. This is real relaxing.
Deadlock has the audacity to laugh, though he follows it with a vented hiss. “Ain’t it though?” The smile on his lips is far from friendly. “Looks like it’s you and me, Autobot. Stuck in this tugboat together, trying not to kill each other. Fun, fun.”
Fun.
Not bloody likely.
Ratchet glares at the holomap, the blinking icon that is their ship in the middle of nothing, and their complete lack of options. They could be rational or they could be reckless.
Ratchet gnaws on his bottom lip, indecision warring within him. He eyes Deadlock. “How skilled are you at piloting this thing?”
“I get by.”
Ratchet stares at the holo-map, at safety that is within reach but a long time away, or a great risk that’ll get him to safety a lot faster. “Skilled enough to get through an asteroid field or two?”
Deadlock lifts an orbital ridge, lip curled in a sneer. “That eager to get away from me already? And here I thought we were becoming friends.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Ratchet says, flattening his tone as much as he can manage. “Can you do it or not?”
Deadlock rolls his shoulders. “I can give it a try. If that’s the action you think is best.”
Ratchet sits back in the chair and sets his jaw. “I think this vacation is a bust, and we need to get back where we belong. Before I kill you.” Or vice versa.
“Aye captain,” Deadlock drawls and throws out a sarcastic salute. He tilts his head. “But before we can go anywhere, that’s gotta come off.” His free hand points right at Ratchet’s intake.
He touches the collar. “You have the key?”
“I have a key,” Deadlock says, and fishes around in his subspace, pulling out a small rectangular object and giving it a wiggle. “That there collar is a Penta tracking device and bomb, the latter of which is just enough to take off your head, if they feel so inclined.”
Well, at least he’d been right to be cautious.
Ratchet folds his arms over his chassis. “Then why are you willing to take it off? Seems to me that’s something you could hold over my head?”
Literally.
“Because I’m not interested in some stray Penta ship picking up on its signal, and figuring out who’s to blame for that trading frag-up.” Deadlock rolls his optics and shifts in the chair, finally lifting the hand over his abdomen to gesture to Ratchet. “So come here so I can take that off you.” He pats his lap pointedly.
Ratchet’s lip curls. “No thanks.”
“You’d rather have a bomb around your neck?” Deadlock asks.
“I’d rather not have to debase myself for a bit of freedom,” Ratchet snaps.
Deadlock rolls his optics and heaves himself out of the chair, moving toward Ratchet’s. “Only a mech who’s never had to bite and claw his way toward an ounce of it would say that.” He touches the rectangular remote to the collar around Ratchet’s neck, and it abruptly disengages with a flash of heat against Ratchet’s plating. “Must’ve been nice.”
Ratchet eases the collar off his neck. “Is it still active?”
“Not while it’s unlatched.”
He tucks the collar-slash-bomb into his subspace. One never knows when something could be useful, especially given that they are floating in the middle of empty space. “Is that what the Decepticons mean for you? Freedom?”
“I don’t think that’s any of your business,” Deadlock says, his tone tight, losing that antagonizing flavor.
Ratchet looks up at him, into amber-red optics that are narrow slits of warning. “So I’m just supposed to pretend I don’t know who you used to be? And what you could’ve been?”
“I was a leaker on the streets, and you saved my spark to make yourself feel better about it,” Deadlock bites out, and anger flashes in his field, but not quick enough to disguise the shame broiling thick and black beneath it. “There’s nothing to pretend because the past doesn’t matter.”
Ratchet twists his jaw. “The past always matters. It’s what shapes us. We’re not strangers, Drift.” He uses the mech’s former designation pointedly. Just because he’d let Megatron rename him into this creature, doesn’t mean the mech he used to be has vanished.
Deadlock’s ventilations audibly crackle. “Aren’t we?” he demands, and it’s with a flexing of fingers into loose fists. “You didn’t save anything back then. You just sent me back out into nothing. I needed saving then, I don’t fragging need it now.”
“Right,” Ratchet drawls. “Because turning into a killer courtesy of the Decepticons is an improvement.”
“I’m fighting for something. There’s a difference,” Deadlock bites out, his tone edged with a growl, his field aggressively filling the small compartment. “And since you became a pawn for the Autobots, I don’t think you have any room to talk.” He pauses, tilts his head, grinning with sharpened denta. “Then again, you’ve always been the Senate’s pawn, haven’t you?”
Ratchet stands, because like frag Deadlock is going to take that tone with him while he’s sitting down like an errant new-spark. “I’m no one’s pawn. I chose the Autobots because it was the right thing to do. Because your boss and his army were tearing their way through everyone and someone had to stop him before he destroyed everything.”
“Yeah, you did a swell job of that,” Deadlock snaps. “Don’t act like the Autobots are free of sin. You’ve destroyed as much as we have.”
“For lack of a better word – you started it. Megatron chose violence, and when diplomacy failed, we responded in kind.”
“Diplomacy. Right.” Deadlock snorts and his field contracts again, sharp and hot and bitter. “It must have been easy for you, living in your tower, to look down on us and decide what we should have done to save ourselves. It’s easy to judge when you already have it all, isn’t it?”
Ratchet chuffs a vent. “That’s an excuse. You wanted this. Megatron wanted this. Violence and death and power, that’s what it’s about. Because if it wasn’t, you wouldn’t have felt the need to pretend to be someone you’re not. You wouldn’t have to hide behind ‘Deadlock’.” He rolls his optics. “You talk about freedom, and then you let Megatron give you a chain, because you hate yourself, you hate who you are, Drift. And that’s no one’s fault but your own.”
Fury rages in Deadlock’s field. It has a tangible presence against Ratchet’s armor, and he almost reels in the face of it.
He shoves a finger at Ratchet and hisses, “Don’t call me that. Drift is dead. That useless leaker is dead. And that’s the way he’s going to stay.” He whirls around, stomping past the two seats on the bridge. “I’m going to recharge. I’ll get the alert when we get close to the first belt. Until then, leave me the frag alone.”
The door to the recharge room rattles shut with a definitive clang that does nothing to dispel the heat of Ratchet’s glare. He’s angry and he’s disappointed, and he’s not sure who both of those emotions are meant for first. He slumps back down into the chair, scrubbing his face with his palm, the taste of Deadlock’s shame and outrage heavy on the edge of his field.
The ship chugs steadily onward. Ratchet can’t call the pace brisk. At best, they are trudging toward their destination. Maybe they can make it through the rings of asteroid belts to rejoin their factions on the other side. More likely, it’ll get them killed.
Honestly, Ratchet doesn’t know which is worse.
~
