[IDW] Lost and Lonely Space 05/12
Nov. 29th, 2018 06:17 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 five
Ratchet recharges not because Deadlock told him to, but because he hadn’t had a decent charge period since the Pentas dragged him to their trading meet. He doesn’t so much slip into recharge as he plummets into it, and is immediately plagued by purges, positive and negative alike.
He onlines later, not feeling rested at all, and he stiffly climbs out of the berth, his back aching, his shoulder echoing it, and his system pinging him for energon. He’s only low because of the injury he ignored, so it’s his own fault.
He pulls one of his last cubes of medgrade out of his subspace and chugs it too quick to taste it. The thick, chalky energon sloughs over his glossa and seeps down his intake, settling in his tank like a weight. It’s slag for taste, but it’ll keep him going for days yet, if he’s frugal with energy expenditure.
He hopes there’s some kind of solar generator on board. He hopes the random spin and drift of the asteroid puts them in range of solar rays. He hopes said random travel doesn’t end up in a collision with another asteroid, with their sorry excuse for a landing caught between.
Ratchet lingers on the edge of the berth for several minutes. He massages his bruised shoulder, rolls it in the socket. A quick scan informs him Deadlock had done a fair job relocating it. It should fully heal within a couple of Cybertronian days.
Small favor.
He doesn’t let himself linger too much longer. He has no desire to be trapped here indefinitely. They have much work to do if there’s any hope of contacting rescue or making some kind of repair to the wreck that’ll get them close to safety. If Deadlock had been telling the truth, and they are that close to the end of the belt, it might be worth it to try.
He steps out of the recharge room. Deadlock isn’t in sight, but there’s a hatch in the floor that’s propped open. Ratchet stands over it and spots Deadlock a level below, hands on his hips as he glares at what constitutes an engine for the shuttle. He doesn’t appear to be armed.
“About time you woke up,” he calls up to Ratchet, without visually acknowledging his presence. “Do you know anything about engines?”
“That’s a dumb question.”
“Yeah. I thought so, too.” Deadlock drops his hands and pokes at something that’s sparking. A piece of it breaks down, slips from his fingers, and clatters to the ground. “Well, that happened.”
Ratchet crouches on the edge and peers down. There’s a mess of loose wires, popped panels, dimly glowing emergency lights, and the occasionally sparking console. In theory, he should be able to do something about it. A ship should not be so different from a Cybertronian. But it is.
“The warp drive’s shot, not that it matters since the ship can’t fly,” Deadlock continues and pokes at something else, which spits sparks at him. “That might be the communications array control.”
“Wonderful.”
“Yeah, I thought so, too.” Deadlock folds his arms over his chest. He tilts his head. “Well, staring at this isn’t doing me any good. Back to what I can actually do.” He turns and climbs out of the hatch.
“And what’s that?” Ratchet asks as he pushes himself upright, knees creaking and betraying his age.
Deadlock shoves his fingers into the cracks of the rear door, getting a good grip. “Digging us out.”
Screech!
Inch by inch, the hatch doors squeak open, the atmosphere rushing out in a wild wind. Ratchet scowls and abruptly switches to internal comm as the hatch opens just far enough for Deadlock to fit through.
“The ship can’t fly,” Ratchet points out.
“No, not yet it can’t. But maybe we can get it airborne.” Deadlock shrugs and slips through the narrow opening. He turns around, optics flicking around the exterior. “Maneuverability will be slag, but we don’t have far to go.”
Ratchet twists his jaw and resists the urge to fold his arms. He’s too aware of how much that makes him appear the disapproving instructor. “We need to maneuver to get past the deadly ring of asteroids between us and the waystation.”
Deadlock’s expression closes off, not a hint of emotion to be seen. “If you’ve got a better idea, be sure to share with the class.” His optics drop to the hatch below Ratchet. “If you don’t, stop judging my efforts and start putting in some of your own.”
“I’m a medic, not an engineer,” Ratchet grounds out. “But I’ll see what I can do.”
“Don’t strain yourself too hard,” Deadlock replies sweetly.
That’s the end of that.
Deadlock starts digging outside – or at least Ratchet assumes he does. He can’t hear a thing without atmosphere to carry the sound. Meanwhile, Ratchet starts poking around the interior of the ship which is much neater and cleaner than it had been earlier. Deadlock must have tidied.
Decepticons. Tidying. Somehow, it doesn’t connect in his head.
He plops down in front of the console, staring glumly at the charred circuits, the faint tang of smoke in the air, the layer of silt on the windshield. He has no idea where to begin, but he supposes it’s best to start somewhere. He digs out a couple bins of spare parts from the bottom half of the storage compartment and stacks them on the second chair.
He eyes the console, compares broken bits with spare bits, and starts replacing what he can match without a doubt. There’s no instruction manual to be found, he suspects if there were, it would all be digital anyway. Luckily, he can still access the console – Deadlock must not have erased his permissions. What would be the point? It’s not like Ratchet can steal the ship out from under him.
It’s slow going. Slow as an IV drip. But it’s progress, however miniscule.
Right now, Ratchet will take what he can get.
~
A week passes by in such a manner. Or at least, a week as best Ratchet can figure. They alternate using the recharge room. They speak only when necessary.
Deadlock works outside when Ratchet is online. He has no idea what Deadlock does while Ratchet recharges. In the meantime, Ratchet concentrates his efforts on the bridge console and occasionally pokes at the engine and primary controls in the hatch.
It starts to feel like he’s putting in effort without any results, mostly to trick himself into thinking there’s forward motion, while slowly and surely sliding into the dread that there’s nothing they can do. They’re stuck. He doesn’t want to be stuck, but inevitability creeps up on him.
Ratchet buries that concern and tries harder, calling upon hours and hours of Wheeljack babbling at him, explaining things that go well beyond Ratchet’s understanding of engineering. He’d listened, because Wheeljack’s passion has always been a sight to behold, but comprehension had been vague at best. He pokes at the system, stirring the sluggish, minimal AI into providing much-needed answers.
He and Deadlock don’t talk, except for brief exchanges.
“Console’s a third fixed.”
“Almost got the tertiary thruster dug out.”
“Still no reception on the comms.”
“Got that solar generator set up if we get so lucky.”
The rest is silence. It’s not companionable. Instead, it ripples and wheezes with an undercurrent of tension. They recharge in shifts, and the berth smells of Deadlock when Ratchet trudges in there for his turn. He wonders if Deadlock notices it smelling of Ratchet when the tables are turned.
He wonders why he cares.
It’s not like he wanders outside occasionally, watching Deadlock shovel with something he’s made of what looks like tape, a broken strut, and a piece of the hull. The steady scrape-toss, scrape-toss of a mech focused on his task. Ratchet’s never paused to admire Deadlock’s frame – heavier, stronger, thicker, built for battle – compared to what Drift had been – thin, no protection, full of open seams, and scarred by living.
Deadlock and Drift are two sides of the same coin. Can’t have one without the other. Right now, Deadlock is the one who keeps staring back at Ratchet, and he wonders if there’s any chance of saving Drift on the other side. Wonders if maybe Deadlock isn’t right, that it’s the Autobots’ fault he ended up where he is.
He should have done more.
Guilt is a heavy burden.
Ratchet always trudges back indoors without saying a word. He doesn’t know if Deadlock ever notices him.
He supposes it doesn’t matter.
A week is a long time to work tirelessly in an effort most likely futile. But they keep going.
What else can they do?
~
There’s such a thing as too much rest.
They’ve been recharging in shifts, but Ratchet can’t stay cooped up in a small room for half a cycle anymore. So when he onlines, instead of lingering in the berth until what he feels is an appropriate time, he swings his legs over the edge and gets up.
He surges out of the berthroom without any subtlety, mostly because he suspects Deadlock is going to be outside, doing whatever it is Deadlock does to pretend he’s contributing to their bid for rescue.
Deadlock is not outside. He’s actually sitting at a table he must have pulled out of a fold out portion of the wall. It’s small, with a booth behind it, and spread out across the surface are the pieces of his two blasters. He’s in the midst of disassembling, cleaning, and reassembling them, Ratchet assumes.
He blinks. Then blinks again. “Are we expecting battle some time soon?”
“The only thing worst than being caught unprepared is knowing you could have been and opted not to,” Deadlock replies in a bland tone. He doesn’t look up, instead continuing to inspect the components of his blaster as if they hold the mysteries of the universe.
“Isn’t that a waste of time?” Ratchet asks because now he’s thinking of his own blaster, tumbled into his subspace without so much as a second thought. Does it even have anything left of a charge?
It’s a bit foolish of him, now that he thinks about it. Just because Deadlock is playing nice right now, doesn’t mean he’s not going to change his mind at a later date. Ratchet is putting too much trust into the memory of a mech he once saved.
“I’m stuck in a crashed tin can with an Autobot, of course it’s not,” Deadlock says with the sort of huffy tone of someone speaking to an idiot.
Ratchet rolls his optics. “We’ve already established I’m not going to kill you.” If anyone should be concerned about the threat of attack, it should be Ratchet.
“Can’t be too careful.” Deadlock looks up then and grins, flashing his sharpened denta at Ratchet as though too aware of how uneasy Ratchet is around him. “Besides, what else am I going to do?”
“Fix the ship?” Ratchet points out, both hands gesturing to the toppled wreck around him. “The engine? The communications array? Any of the dozen things that are broken around here?”
Deadlock sets down one shining part and picks up another. “Do I look like an engineer?” he asks with a raised orbital ridge, his gaze never wandering from Ratchet. “Why don’t you fix it?”
“I’m a doctor, not an engineer,” Ratchet retorts.
“And I’m a warrior, not a scientist.” Deadlock shrugs, and his hands are astonishingly nimble as they clean and polish the parts of his blasters without looking. “If I stare at that thing any longer, my processor’s gonna melt. So I’m taking a break. Gotta problem with that?” There’s challenge in his tone, in the soft rev of his engine.
It’s like he’s daring Ratchet to make it a problem. Maybe he wants to fight. Maybe the tension of their shared space is getting to him, as much as it’s getting to Ratchet.
It’s hard to spend so much time buried in another mech’s energy field. Secrets become a muddled mess. All he can smell and taste is Deadlock in the air. His emotions are a tangle of guilt and anger, and blast it all, deep down in the pit of his tanks, arousal. Attraction.
Because Ratchet is weak, and Deadlock is one fine piece of work. Kudos to whomever had designed his frame upgrades, because they certainly know how to put a mech together. Almost as if they’d known exactly what revs Ratchet’s engine the most.
“Even if I did, I’m not your CO,” Ratchet finally bites out. He glances at the main console, the stray wires, the mix of burnt components and shiny new components and still, all it does is glare emergency-orange at them.
“Nope.” Deadlock pops the word, calling Ratchet’s attention back, and gestures to the rickety chair across from him. “Have a seat. Take a break. This is your vacation right?”
Ratchet eyes him for a long moment before he pulls out the stool and lowers himself into it, tense as he waits for it crumple beneath him. But it holds.
There’s enough space on the table in front of him. He pulls out his own blaster and sets it on the surface. The indicator reads a quarter charge.
“For lack of a better word.” Ratchet pops out the charge pack and sets it aside. If there’s not a spare around here, he’ll have to hope there’s a charging dock.
“Why?” Deadlock asks.
Ratchet frowns. “Why what?” He fumbles with the blaster. He can’t remember the last time he fully disassembled it. He’d always given it to Ironhide when it needed any kind of maintenance.
He’s a medic, not a weapons specialist. He’s not supposed to know how to manage weapons. He’s supposed to save lives, not take them.
“Why are you on vacation in the middle of a war?” Deadlock asks, and at least his tone is curious rather than accusatory. “Seems kind of stupid, right?”
Ratchet grunts and fumbles with a lever, though he’s not sure what it does. “It wasn’t my idea. Optimus seems to think I needed space.”
Deadlock sighs. “Give it to me.”
Ratchet looks up, blinking at the segue. “What?”
Deadlock snaps his fingers and leans across the table, elbow braced on one of his blaster’s components. “Your blaster. You’re going to break it if you keep doing that.”
Ratchet hesitates.
Deadlock rolls his optics. “If I wanted to hurt you, I’d do it with the spare, fully assembled blaster in my subspace, not the one you’re about to hand me.”
“Charity doesn’t seem like something you’re keen on,” Ratchet says.
“It physically hurts me to watch you struggle with that.” Deadlock snaps his fingers again, his smirk a shade too superior to be anything but mocking. “Or you could ruin it and then have no weapon. It’s all the same to me.”
Ratchet presses his lips together and hands the blaster over. Deadlock can’t accept it like a normal mech, no. He has to run his fingers along Ratchet’s before he slips the blaster from Ratchet’s grasp and then salutes him with it.
“Thank you for your trust,” he drawls, except it rings of mockery. He looks at the blaster, turning it this way and that. “Nothing special about this, I see. Pretty standard.”
Ratchet pulls out a datapad so he can have something to do with his hands. He digs through the archives, looking for anything to use as a distraction. He gets lucky. There’s a deleted file in the bin, a fantasy novella he used to think he’d never have time to read.
“I’m a medic. It’s purely for self-defense.”
“Uh huh. And how many mechs have you killed with it?”
Ratchet doesn’t dignify that question with a response. He listens to Deadlock disassemble the blaster with a few easy twists of his hands. He pretends to focus on his datapad, on the re-discovery of an old interest. Somehow, it doesn’t seem interesting anymore.
“Or I guess they don’t count because they are Decepticons.”
Ratchet’s engine growls. “Forty-two,” he says, and his spark spins and spins into a tiny ball. He’s discharged his weapon one-hundred and sixty-eight times since the official start of the war.
Forty-two of those discharges have resulted in the death of another Cybertronian.
He wishes he could say he knows their names or he’s memorized their faces, but that would be a lie. He doesn’t remember anything but the weight of their deaths on his conscience, the cracks in his medical coding each taken spark leaves behind. Forty-two sparks are a heavy burden for a medic to bear.
Ratchet’s not a stranger to death. He’s had mechs die on him before, usually because he wasn’t skilled enough to save them, or there was no chance to save them in the first place, or for some reason out of his control. He’s bowed his head over more frames than he can count – and yes, those names he recalls. Those names are in a file he keeps buried deep, deep in his processor. On particularly dark times, he pulls that file out and reads it, to remind himself what he does and doesn’t deserve.
But those deaths are different. Those are not his fault. Yes, he wasn’t good enough, skilled enough, capable of miracles. He hadn’t, however, pulled the trigger. He hadn’t looked into those mech’s optics, saw a living mech, and decided their life was his to end.
He had stared into the face of forty-two mechs and decided his life was worth more than theirs. He’d chosen to live.
His coding has yet to forgive him for it. He doubts it ever will.
“Huh,” Deadlock says, not a trace of emotion in the reply. Ratchet’s blaster falls to his pieces in his hands, and each one is treated to the same intense cleaning as Deadlock’s own.
“I suppose your count is much larger,” Ratchet says, trying to sound casual, but failing. He knows it comes across as an accusation.
“I wouldn’t know,” Deadlock replies, light, distracted. “I haven’t been keeping count.” He pauses and looks up, head tilted, lips curled. “I’ve killed a lot of Autobots, medic. That kind of what happens in war. You kill the mechs who are trying to kill you back.”
Ratchet’s vents hitch.
Deadlock’s baiting him. He knows the Decepticon is. There’s challenge in Deadlock’s tone, in the glint of his optics, in the way he’s bracing himself, preparing for a shouting match.
“Yes,” Ratchet says, and he knows it sounds strangled, but there’s no point in picking a fight. They’re stuck here together. “I suppose that’s true.”
He lies.
Or perhaps lie isn’t the correct term. He dismisses a topic point that will only lead them around and around in circles. Deadlock might be indifferent to the amount of deaths on his conscience, but Ratchet doesn’t have that luxury. Can’t afford to have that luxury.
They all have their coping mechanisms.
What’s that idiom Prowl loves to spout at them from time to time? Especially when he’s proposing a plan of action Optimus vehemently declines, even if it would be a success and ensure a quicker end to the war?
“All villains are heroes in their own stories.”
Deadlock reassembles Ratchet’s blaster and hands it across the table, grip first. “As long as you don’t try to kill me, I’m not going to try and kill you,” he says as Ratchet’s fingers close around the grip.
“Noted.”
Deadlock releases the blaster, and Ratchet takes it back. The charge is still at a quarter, but it’s gleaming like new, and he has no doubt that if he has to use it, there will be no issues.
“Thank you,” Ratchet says.
Deadlock blinks. “You’re welcome.”
Ratchet tucks the blaster away and excuses himself, slipping out of the ship without another word. There’s a strange churning sensation in his tank, he can’t quite define it. For them, that is darn near friendly.
It’s better, he thinks. If they’re stuck like this indefinitely, it’s better that they get along.
Outside, it’s chilly and still. Above is a noiseless clash of asteroid against asteroid, dancing and spinning through space.
Ratchet circles around the ship, taking in Deadlock’s handiwork. He’s made steady progress on digging them out. Another week or so, and they might have enough solid ground to make a decent launch – if they can get the engine working and repair the thrusters enough to make that first, important push.
There’s a long line of debris behind them, delineating the track of their crash. Bits and pieces of the broken ship dot the ground.
It occurs to Ratchet that some of the parts they are missing might be in that debris path. At the very least, they can reclaim pieces of the hull or other things to repurpose them. It probably wouldn’t hurt to venture a bit further from the crash site either.
Right now, they think they’re alone on this asteroid. It might be nice to know for sure. Who knows? Maybe they’ll get lucky and there’s another crashed ship or an abandoned trading station or something out there that’ll save them.
Ratchet heads back into the ship, slipping through the narrow rear doors. He looks to the table, but it’s empty, Deadlock’s blasters gone from the surface. It’s been wiped down, all traces of grease and filth gone.
Ratchet cocks his head, but the washrack isn’t running. The door to the recharge room is closed.
Well, there’s always tomorrow.
It’s not like they’re going anywhere anytime soon.
Ratchet plops down at the main console and sighs as he stares at the frayed wires and charred components.
He might as well get back to work.
*
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 recharges not because Deadlock told him to, but because he hadn’t had a decent charge period since the Pentas dragged him to their trading meet. He doesn’t so much slip into recharge as he plummets into it, and is immediately plagued by purges, positive and negative alike.
He onlines later, not feeling rested at all, and he stiffly climbs out of the berth, his back aching, his shoulder echoing it, and his system pinging him for energon. He’s only low because of the injury he ignored, so it’s his own fault.
He pulls one of his last cubes of medgrade out of his subspace and chugs it too quick to taste it. The thick, chalky energon sloughs over his glossa and seeps down his intake, settling in his tank like a weight. It’s slag for taste, but it’ll keep him going for days yet, if he’s frugal with energy expenditure.
He hopes there’s some kind of solar generator on board. He hopes the random spin and drift of the asteroid puts them in range of solar rays. He hopes said random travel doesn’t end up in a collision with another asteroid, with their sorry excuse for a landing caught between.
Ratchet lingers on the edge of the berth for several minutes. He massages his bruised shoulder, rolls it in the socket. A quick scan informs him Deadlock had done a fair job relocating it. It should fully heal within a couple of Cybertronian days.
Small favor.
He doesn’t let himself linger too much longer. He has no desire to be trapped here indefinitely. They have much work to do if there’s any hope of contacting rescue or making some kind of repair to the wreck that’ll get them close to safety. If Deadlock had been telling the truth, and they are that close to the end of the belt, it might be worth it to try.
He steps out of the recharge room. Deadlock isn’t in sight, but there’s a hatch in the floor that’s propped open. Ratchet stands over it and spots Deadlock a level below, hands on his hips as he glares at what constitutes an engine for the shuttle. He doesn’t appear to be armed.
“About time you woke up,” he calls up to Ratchet, without visually acknowledging his presence. “Do you know anything about engines?”
“That’s a dumb question.”
“Yeah. I thought so, too.” Deadlock drops his hands and pokes at something that’s sparking. A piece of it breaks down, slips from his fingers, and clatters to the ground. “Well, that happened.”
Ratchet crouches on the edge and peers down. There’s a mess of loose wires, popped panels, dimly glowing emergency lights, and the occasionally sparking console. In theory, he should be able to do something about it. A ship should not be so different from a Cybertronian. But it is.
“The warp drive’s shot, not that it matters since the ship can’t fly,” Deadlock continues and pokes at something else, which spits sparks at him. “That might be the communications array control.”
“Wonderful.”
“Yeah, I thought so, too.” Deadlock folds his arms over his chest. He tilts his head. “Well, staring at this isn’t doing me any good. Back to what I can actually do.” He turns and climbs out of the hatch.
“And what’s that?” Ratchet asks as he pushes himself upright, knees creaking and betraying his age.
Deadlock shoves his fingers into the cracks of the rear door, getting a good grip. “Digging us out.”
Screech!
Inch by inch, the hatch doors squeak open, the atmosphere rushing out in a wild wind. Ratchet scowls and abruptly switches to internal comm as the hatch opens just far enough for Deadlock to fit through.
“The ship can’t fly,” Ratchet points out.
“No, not yet it can’t. But maybe we can get it airborne.” Deadlock shrugs and slips through the narrow opening. He turns around, optics flicking around the exterior. “Maneuverability will be slag, but we don’t have far to go.”
Ratchet twists his jaw and resists the urge to fold his arms. He’s too aware of how much that makes him appear the disapproving instructor. “We need to maneuver to get past the deadly ring of asteroids between us and the waystation.”
Deadlock’s expression closes off, not a hint of emotion to be seen. “If you’ve got a better idea, be sure to share with the class.” His optics drop to the hatch below Ratchet. “If you don’t, stop judging my efforts and start putting in some of your own.”
“I’m a medic, not an engineer,” Ratchet grounds out. “But I’ll see what I can do.”
“Don’t strain yourself too hard,” Deadlock replies sweetly.
That’s the end of that.
Deadlock starts digging outside – or at least Ratchet assumes he does. He can’t hear a thing without atmosphere to carry the sound. Meanwhile, Ratchet starts poking around the interior of the ship which is much neater and cleaner than it had been earlier. Deadlock must have tidied.
Decepticons. Tidying. Somehow, it doesn’t connect in his head.
He plops down in front of the console, staring glumly at the charred circuits, the faint tang of smoke in the air, the layer of silt on the windshield. He has no idea where to begin, but he supposes it’s best to start somewhere. He digs out a couple bins of spare parts from the bottom half of the storage compartment and stacks them on the second chair.
He eyes the console, compares broken bits with spare bits, and starts replacing what he can match without a doubt. There’s no instruction manual to be found, he suspects if there were, it would all be digital anyway. Luckily, he can still access the console – Deadlock must not have erased his permissions. What would be the point? It’s not like Ratchet can steal the ship out from under him.
It’s slow going. Slow as an IV drip. But it’s progress, however miniscule.
Right now, Ratchet will take what he can get.
A week passes by in such a manner. Or at least, a week as best Ratchet can figure. They alternate using the recharge room. They speak only when necessary.
Deadlock works outside when Ratchet is online. He has no idea what Deadlock does while Ratchet recharges. In the meantime, Ratchet concentrates his efforts on the bridge console and occasionally pokes at the engine and primary controls in the hatch.
It starts to feel like he’s putting in effort without any results, mostly to trick himself into thinking there’s forward motion, while slowly and surely sliding into the dread that there’s nothing they can do. They’re stuck. He doesn’t want to be stuck, but inevitability creeps up on him.
Ratchet buries that concern and tries harder, calling upon hours and hours of Wheeljack babbling at him, explaining things that go well beyond Ratchet’s understanding of engineering. He’d listened, because Wheeljack’s passion has always been a sight to behold, but comprehension had been vague at best. He pokes at the system, stirring the sluggish, minimal AI into providing much-needed answers.
He and Deadlock don’t talk, except for brief exchanges.
“Console’s a third fixed.”
“Almost got the tertiary thruster dug out.”
“Still no reception on the comms.”
“Got that solar generator set up if we get so lucky.”
The rest is silence. It’s not companionable. Instead, it ripples and wheezes with an undercurrent of tension. They recharge in shifts, and the berth smells of Deadlock when Ratchet trudges in there for his turn. He wonders if Deadlock notices it smelling of Ratchet when the tables are turned.
He wonders why he cares.
It’s not like he wanders outside occasionally, watching Deadlock shovel with something he’s made of what looks like tape, a broken strut, and a piece of the hull. The steady scrape-toss, scrape-toss of a mech focused on his task. Ratchet’s never paused to admire Deadlock’s frame – heavier, stronger, thicker, built for battle – compared to what Drift had been – thin, no protection, full of open seams, and scarred by living.
Deadlock and Drift are two sides of the same coin. Can’t have one without the other. Right now, Deadlock is the one who keeps staring back at Ratchet, and he wonders if there’s any chance of saving Drift on the other side. Wonders if maybe Deadlock isn’t right, that it’s the Autobots’ fault he ended up where he is.
He should have done more.
Guilt is a heavy burden.
Ratchet always trudges back indoors without saying a word. He doesn’t know if Deadlock ever notices him.
He supposes it doesn’t matter.
A week is a long time to work tirelessly in an effort most likely futile. But they keep going.
What else can they do?
There’s such a thing as too much rest.
They’ve been recharging in shifts, but Ratchet can’t stay cooped up in a small room for half a cycle anymore. So when he onlines, instead of lingering in the berth until what he feels is an appropriate time, he swings his legs over the edge and gets up.
He surges out of the berthroom without any subtlety, mostly because he suspects Deadlock is going to be outside, doing whatever it is Deadlock does to pretend he’s contributing to their bid for rescue.
Deadlock is not outside. He’s actually sitting at a table he must have pulled out of a fold out portion of the wall. It’s small, with a booth behind it, and spread out across the surface are the pieces of his two blasters. He’s in the midst of disassembling, cleaning, and reassembling them, Ratchet assumes.
He blinks. Then blinks again. “Are we expecting battle some time soon?”
“The only thing worst than being caught unprepared is knowing you could have been and opted not to,” Deadlock replies in a bland tone. He doesn’t look up, instead continuing to inspect the components of his blaster as if they hold the mysteries of the universe.
“Isn’t that a waste of time?” Ratchet asks because now he’s thinking of his own blaster, tumbled into his subspace without so much as a second thought. Does it even have anything left of a charge?
It’s a bit foolish of him, now that he thinks about it. Just because Deadlock is playing nice right now, doesn’t mean he’s not going to change his mind at a later date. Ratchet is putting too much trust into the memory of a mech he once saved.
“I’m stuck in a crashed tin can with an Autobot, of course it’s not,” Deadlock says with the sort of huffy tone of someone speaking to an idiot.
Ratchet rolls his optics. “We’ve already established I’m not going to kill you.” If anyone should be concerned about the threat of attack, it should be Ratchet.
“Can’t be too careful.” Deadlock looks up then and grins, flashing his sharpened denta at Ratchet as though too aware of how uneasy Ratchet is around him. “Besides, what else am I going to do?”
“Fix the ship?” Ratchet points out, both hands gesturing to the toppled wreck around him. “The engine? The communications array? Any of the dozen things that are broken around here?”
Deadlock sets down one shining part and picks up another. “Do I look like an engineer?” he asks with a raised orbital ridge, his gaze never wandering from Ratchet. “Why don’t you fix it?”
“I’m a doctor, not an engineer,” Ratchet retorts.
“And I’m a warrior, not a scientist.” Deadlock shrugs, and his hands are astonishingly nimble as they clean and polish the parts of his blasters without looking. “If I stare at that thing any longer, my processor’s gonna melt. So I’m taking a break. Gotta problem with that?” There’s challenge in his tone, in the soft rev of his engine.
It’s like he’s daring Ratchet to make it a problem. Maybe he wants to fight. Maybe the tension of their shared space is getting to him, as much as it’s getting to Ratchet.
It’s hard to spend so much time buried in another mech’s energy field. Secrets become a muddled mess. All he can smell and taste is Deadlock in the air. His emotions are a tangle of guilt and anger, and blast it all, deep down in the pit of his tanks, arousal. Attraction.
Because Ratchet is weak, and Deadlock is one fine piece of work. Kudos to whomever had designed his frame upgrades, because they certainly know how to put a mech together. Almost as if they’d known exactly what revs Ratchet’s engine the most.
“Even if I did, I’m not your CO,” Ratchet finally bites out. He glances at the main console, the stray wires, the mix of burnt components and shiny new components and still, all it does is glare emergency-orange at them.
“Nope.” Deadlock pops the word, calling Ratchet’s attention back, and gestures to the rickety chair across from him. “Have a seat. Take a break. This is your vacation right?”
Ratchet eyes him for a long moment before he pulls out the stool and lowers himself into it, tense as he waits for it crumple beneath him. But it holds.
There’s enough space on the table in front of him. He pulls out his own blaster and sets it on the surface. The indicator reads a quarter charge.
“For lack of a better word.” Ratchet pops out the charge pack and sets it aside. If there’s not a spare around here, he’ll have to hope there’s a charging dock.
“Why?” Deadlock asks.
Ratchet frowns. “Why what?” He fumbles with the blaster. He can’t remember the last time he fully disassembled it. He’d always given it to Ironhide when it needed any kind of maintenance.
He’s a medic, not a weapons specialist. He’s not supposed to know how to manage weapons. He’s supposed to save lives, not take them.
“Why are you on vacation in the middle of a war?” Deadlock asks, and at least his tone is curious rather than accusatory. “Seems kind of stupid, right?”
Ratchet grunts and fumbles with a lever, though he’s not sure what it does. “It wasn’t my idea. Optimus seems to think I needed space.”
Deadlock sighs. “Give it to me.”
Ratchet looks up, blinking at the segue. “What?”
Deadlock snaps his fingers and leans across the table, elbow braced on one of his blaster’s components. “Your blaster. You’re going to break it if you keep doing that.”
Ratchet hesitates.
Deadlock rolls his optics. “If I wanted to hurt you, I’d do it with the spare, fully assembled blaster in my subspace, not the one you’re about to hand me.”
“Charity doesn’t seem like something you’re keen on,” Ratchet says.
“It physically hurts me to watch you struggle with that.” Deadlock snaps his fingers again, his smirk a shade too superior to be anything but mocking. “Or you could ruin it and then have no weapon. It’s all the same to me.”
Ratchet presses his lips together and hands the blaster over. Deadlock can’t accept it like a normal mech, no. He has to run his fingers along Ratchet’s before he slips the blaster from Ratchet’s grasp and then salutes him with it.
“Thank you for your trust,” he drawls, except it rings of mockery. He looks at the blaster, turning it this way and that. “Nothing special about this, I see. Pretty standard.”
Ratchet pulls out a datapad so he can have something to do with his hands. He digs through the archives, looking for anything to use as a distraction. He gets lucky. There’s a deleted file in the bin, a fantasy novella he used to think he’d never have time to read.
“I’m a medic. It’s purely for self-defense.”
“Uh huh. And how many mechs have you killed with it?”
Ratchet doesn’t dignify that question with a response. He listens to Deadlock disassemble the blaster with a few easy twists of his hands. He pretends to focus on his datapad, on the re-discovery of an old interest. Somehow, it doesn’t seem interesting anymore.
“Or I guess they don’t count because they are Decepticons.”
Ratchet’s engine growls. “Forty-two,” he says, and his spark spins and spins into a tiny ball. He’s discharged his weapon one-hundred and sixty-eight times since the official start of the war.
Forty-two of those discharges have resulted in the death of another Cybertronian.
He wishes he could say he knows their names or he’s memorized their faces, but that would be a lie. He doesn’t remember anything but the weight of their deaths on his conscience, the cracks in his medical coding each taken spark leaves behind. Forty-two sparks are a heavy burden for a medic to bear.
Ratchet’s not a stranger to death. He’s had mechs die on him before, usually because he wasn’t skilled enough to save them, or there was no chance to save them in the first place, or for some reason out of his control. He’s bowed his head over more frames than he can count – and yes, those names he recalls. Those names are in a file he keeps buried deep, deep in his processor. On particularly dark times, he pulls that file out and reads it, to remind himself what he does and doesn’t deserve.
But those deaths are different. Those are not his fault. Yes, he wasn’t good enough, skilled enough, capable of miracles. He hadn’t, however, pulled the trigger. He hadn’t looked into those mech’s optics, saw a living mech, and decided their life was his to end.
He had stared into the face of forty-two mechs and decided his life was worth more than theirs. He’d chosen to live.
His coding has yet to forgive him for it. He doubts it ever will.
“Huh,” Deadlock says, not a trace of emotion in the reply. Ratchet’s blaster falls to his pieces in his hands, and each one is treated to the same intense cleaning as Deadlock’s own.
“I suppose your count is much larger,” Ratchet says, trying to sound casual, but failing. He knows it comes across as an accusation.
“I wouldn’t know,” Deadlock replies, light, distracted. “I haven’t been keeping count.” He pauses and looks up, head tilted, lips curled. “I’ve killed a lot of Autobots, medic. That kind of what happens in war. You kill the mechs who are trying to kill you back.”
Ratchet’s vents hitch.
Deadlock’s baiting him. He knows the Decepticon is. There’s challenge in Deadlock’s tone, in the glint of his optics, in the way he’s bracing himself, preparing for a shouting match.
“Yes,” Ratchet says, and he knows it sounds strangled, but there’s no point in picking a fight. They’re stuck here together. “I suppose that’s true.”
He lies.
Or perhaps lie isn’t the correct term. He dismisses a topic point that will only lead them around and around in circles. Deadlock might be indifferent to the amount of deaths on his conscience, but Ratchet doesn’t have that luxury. Can’t afford to have that luxury.
They all have their coping mechanisms.
What’s that idiom Prowl loves to spout at them from time to time? Especially when he’s proposing a plan of action Optimus vehemently declines, even if it would be a success and ensure a quicker end to the war?
“All villains are heroes in their own stories.”
Deadlock reassembles Ratchet’s blaster and hands it across the table, grip first. “As long as you don’t try to kill me, I’m not going to try and kill you,” he says as Ratchet’s fingers close around the grip.
“Noted.”
Deadlock releases the blaster, and Ratchet takes it back. The charge is still at a quarter, but it’s gleaming like new, and he has no doubt that if he has to use it, there will be no issues.
“Thank you,” Ratchet says.
Deadlock blinks. “You’re welcome.”
Ratchet tucks the blaster away and excuses himself, slipping out of the ship without another word. There’s a strange churning sensation in his tank, he can’t quite define it. For them, that is darn near friendly.
It’s better, he thinks. If they’re stuck like this indefinitely, it’s better that they get along.
Outside, it’s chilly and still. Above is a noiseless clash of asteroid against asteroid, dancing and spinning through space.
Ratchet circles around the ship, taking in Deadlock’s handiwork. He’s made steady progress on digging them out. Another week or so, and they might have enough solid ground to make a decent launch – if they can get the engine working and repair the thrusters enough to make that first, important push.
There’s a long line of debris behind them, delineating the track of their crash. Bits and pieces of the broken ship dot the ground.
It occurs to Ratchet that some of the parts they are missing might be in that debris path. At the very least, they can reclaim pieces of the hull or other things to repurpose them. It probably wouldn’t hurt to venture a bit further from the crash site either.
Right now, they think they’re alone on this asteroid. It might be nice to know for sure. Who knows? Maybe they’ll get lucky and there’s another crashed ship or an abandoned trading station or something out there that’ll save them.
Ratchet heads back into the ship, slipping through the narrow rear doors. He looks to the table, but it’s empty, Deadlock’s blasters gone from the surface. It’s been wiped down, all traces of grease and filth gone.
Ratchet cocks his head, but the washrack isn’t running. The door to the recharge room is closed.
Well, there’s always tomorrow.
It’s not like they’re going anywhere anytime soon.
Ratchet plops down at the main console and sighs as he stares at the frayed wires and charred components.
He might as well get back to work.
