Title: Ozone (The Extended Raunchy Xenophilia Edition)
Author: Femme4jack
Fandom: Bayverse (pre 2011 movie, not compliant with tie-in novel)
Characters: Mikaela Banes/Ratchet/Ironhide
Rating: NC-17
WARNINGS: cussing, graphic xenophilia smut (mech/mech/human female oral, spark corona, tactile & neural stimulation) & mech/mech smut (PnP)
Summary: Mikaela's normal coping methods aren't working. Ratchet and Ironhide decide to help.
Notes: Thanks to the fabulous Merfilly for beta-reading the extended edition of this story. The last section is for you, hon. This was completely influenced by her recent delicious Mikaela-centric stories found on an An Archive of Our Own (Ao3). The non raunchy parts were also influenced by Dwimordene's Bridges (which is head canon for me, and the most frequently reread story on my favs). I especially loved the idea in Merfilly's story about Mikaela taking the place of Ratchet's microbots.
I originally wrote this as a gen friendship story about Ratchet & Mikaela, but the naughty bunnies bit and insisted on a raunchy extension for the Threesome on a Beach Challenge. You'll find the new sections after the first break.

ETA: Part of the challenge was to include 5 of the following 20 words:

Turkey bacon, Kegel, WD-40, Boomstick (shameless self promotion ftw), unmentionables, bassinet, turtle, albatross, Boots the Monkey, Litter, Red Herring, text message, gypsy, Jack daniels, penis, sandworms, Bookmark, nude model, fishing rod, and Pretender.

I included 7. I'll write a Mik/Autobot of your choice for the first reviewer to note all 7 :)

Finally, there is a lot of profanity in this story. If you have your filter on, there are a lot of sentences that will be incomplete. Just substitute your favorite f-work (like freaking) and it will make some sense :)

Ozone (The Extended Raunchy Xenophilia Edition)

It really wasn't a surprise to find herself alone and on the road again. Whether it was her dad or her ex-boyfriends, guys had been in and out of her life so many times she'd found a system for washing away the pain. When she'd been younger, she'd take long walks in the desert, sometimes all night long. Not like there was anyone who noticed.

When she was old enough, she rode. She'd grab a bike from the shop and hit the roads that wound their way around the mesas, preferably just before or after one of the monsoon thunderstorms left the air smelling like ozone. Seemed like the most painful parting of ways usually happened midsummer, the time of year when the thunderheads would mass over the Sierra Nevadas on a hot afternoon and begin their march to the east.

But this time, the ozone charged air was not helping her forget. It was too much like the scent of the sparks she had been working so close to. She had gotten to know that hair-raising, charged scent all too well over the years since she had taken the place of Ratchet's long deactivated microbot drones (her hands, laced with a spiderweb of scars from the cuts and burns, were a visual reminder of the hours clocked in close proximity).

Perhaps it was her imagination, but each spark smelt (and felt) like a different part of the storm. Bumblebee's was hair raising storm about to erupt, mostly calm, but with downdrafts from the approaching supercell that could hit you hard and even force you off the road if you weren't careful: the promise of a fury to come. Ironhide and Sideswipe's were the raging climax of the storm (Hide's the kind that came with golfball-sized hail), unleashing madness on the desert and filling the arroyos with flash floods that could cover a road faster than you could cross it. Ratchet's scent was the comfort of a storm that had mostly passed, of thirsty ground now quenched. You could still smell the focussed-fury in his spark, but it was also the more subtle scent of the late afternoon sun reemerging and warming the damp, desert earth.

Then there was Optimus. His spark was the entire storm. She could smell every one of them in him, and more. His spark somehow contained them all, and was both violence and gentleness and the sound of thunder echoing through the canyons.

She stopped the Harley at one of the arroyos flooded from the storm that had pummeled the Sierra foothills. She got off and sat next to the brown, muddy torrent, deeper than anyone unfamiliar with the danger would suspect. Soon enough, an engine stopped behind her, and its pitch and resonance, along with the unique melody of the transformation sequence that followed told her exactly who was there. But she would have known without the sounds. She could smell his spark.

She smiled.

She was such a little girl sometimes. She had hoped one of them would follow her after word of the fight had spread as fast as comm signals. She had not expected anyone to follow. No one had followed her before when she fled to the desert. But she had hoped.

"You believe that your presence with us is no longer valued, simply because you and your former mate have chosen to nullify your short-lived affiliation," he stated simply, but after spending her young adult years working so closely with him, she could hear the hurt in his slightly acerbic tone.

"You've had the materials to build a couple of drones for over a year, Ratchet. Even without sparks, they are going to be more useful than I am, and will last, what, like about a hundred thousand years longer than I will?" She tried to keep the little pouting girl out of her voice, but knew she failed entirely when he gave the electric version of a snort, and sat down beside her far more gracefully than anyone that large should be able. He offered her his hands so he could bring her closer to his optics, which she accepted, curling into the warmth that radiated through her leather.

"Drones aren't nearly as interesting to argue with, nor do they tell off my patients so spectacularly," he replied, the glint in his optics saying nearly as much as his words. "Besides, if I recall, you have been the one who has stuck with us all along, Mikaela," he added, acknowledging what no one had ever spoken before.

She shook her head, and finally laughed. Sam had been the one who had demanded to have the "normal" life, treating his best friend (thousands of years older and wiser then him) like some family golden retriever that he could give a pat and leave at home. She had been the one who had used her own money and contacts from the shop to scrounge parts, trying to locate the seemingly endless list of supplies Ratchet had requested before there was anything called NEST (or Budget Liaisons) in the Autobot vocabulary.

"Well, if you really can't make it work without me, I guess I can stick around and help out your sorry aft," she said with a smirk.

The fuck if she was going to let Sam take the smell of that ozone away from her.

She was curled up in Ratchet's passenger seat, the Harley in the back. There was no one on the winding roads through the mesas, no reason for her or a hologram to pretend to drive. The sun had come back out and steam was rising off of the ground as most of the rain that had fallen evaporated back into the thirsty sky. Ratchet was remaining quiet, leaving her to her thoughts.

Her most recent argument with Sam, the one that had finally ended things, kept replaying itself in her head like an iPod set to repeat. The accusations stung because they were true. She loved him because of the Autobots, not because of himself, and was far more turned on by having her arms deep in an alien chassis than touching her boyfriend.

The attraction to Sam had never been a physical one for her. Her physical attraction with men usually ended at their muscular biceps, or, if she were so lucky, nicely stacked abs. Sam had neither. Everything from the abs down, if she were honest with herself, was rather repulsive to her.

She had felt like such a shallow bitch admitting it to herself. She wanted to be turned on by Sam, but her body just wouldn't cooperate. She loved him because he, even in his inability to say it, loved her. She hadn't been an accessory to his ego. She had been the object of his worship. And it felt good for a girl to be worshipped. Not to mention that he had given her the Autobots. How could she not love him for that?

But at some point, the lack of physical desire had taken its toll, especially when she made the mistake of admitting to him just what a penis didn't do for her, and what the scents and sensations of working so close to those sparks did. Then he had found her getting herself off in the room they shared on base, her arms slathered with Ratchet's silver burn gel from her latest minor injury. Sam was furious to see that she was hurt again. Or perhaps he was furious that she was masturbating when she'd turned him down earlier. It wasn't clear which.

What was clear was that an alien war, and their shared cocktail of wonder, fear and post traumatic stress was not enough to hold them together any longer, and Sam, in desperation for what he knew he was losing, was trying to pull her away from what had brought them together in the first place.

"We aren't going back to base?" she asked, coming back to the present enough to see the direction they pointedly weren't heading.

"You finally noticed?" Ratchet asked back, his rumble of laughter filling the very air around her.

"Ok, so where the hell are we going, doc?"

The Hummer turned onto a dirt road that was barely more than a couple of ruts, already mostly dry. The deep tracks were no issue for Ratchet's alien suspension.

"The beach," he explained, as though it were completely normal to be heading to Malibu on a forest service road in the middle of the desert.

"The beach," she echoed, dubiously. "Um, did you get hit by a null ray when I wasn't looking? Because there isn't a beach in the middle of the desert."

"You are limiting your definitions to the sort of beach one might find next to your planet's oceans. But according to your internet, a beach is simply the shore of a body of water, especially when sandy or pebbly. I assumed that though you have apparently consented to stay on and 'help out my sorry aft,' you also would prefer not to return to base until Samuel and Bumblebee have taken their own 'sorry afts' to Tranquility. I therefore selected a location far enough off the main roads that I can comfortably be in my root mode, and we can both enjoy some afternoon sun, though I would request that you apply some form of protection to your dermal layers."

It made enough sense. For all that the Autobots were giant death machines locked in a fratricidal war that spanned back longer than human civilization, they were also, to put it nicely, sun sluts. They all had specialized plating that allowed them to convert energon from solar radiation, and though it was a slower process, it was a far preferable fuel source for them than carbon based fuels, which led to the Cybertronian equivalent of putrid and painful gas. It was a rare day when at least one of them would not be found sun-worshipping like a lizard, either in alt mode, or, preferably, stretched out in root mode to allow the maximum exposure. "It is like an all you can eat buffet that you don't have to pay for," Bumblebee had once said. "That your species doesn't take better advantage of it is completely baffling to us."

"I hate sunblock," Mikaela muttered under her breath. "I have Cherokee, Mexican, and Italian in my genes. Don't need it."

"Dark pigmentation doesn't protect you from damage at the cellular level, girl. I can heal minor burns, not melanoma," Ratchet grumbled in response to the old argument.

"So what sort of beach are we going to?" she asked, deflecting him.

"Get out and I'll show you. Don't worry about the bike. I'll subspace it." The search and rescue Hummer stopped and opened his passenger door. She stepped out onto the soft, powdery brown-red dirt, patched here and there with sage brush, junipers, and chamisas. She recognized what must of been The Virgin River making a wide bend around one of the striated mesas. The tributary of the Colorado River was one of the few streams in the area that had water in it year round. By any other region's standards it was barely a creek, yet in the desert, if it had water in it year round, it was a river, even when it was only about ten feet wide and a few feet deep. There was a sandy shore by the bend, along with a grove of Cottonwoods. And a large black Topkick soaking up the sun.

Ironhide's presence shouldn't have surprised her. Ratchet and Ironhide tended to spend quite a bit of their off duty hours in the other's company, whether sparring, arguing, or interfacing. She had long ago ceased being embarrassed by walking in on any of the Autobots when their cables were out. It was as normal and non-private an affair for them as consuming a cube of energon. Though none in the cohort limited themselves to a single partner (jealousy was considered a glitch), Ironhide and Ratchet went way back, and enjoyed one another's company. A lot.

Which meant she could look forward to an afternoon of sunbathing and watching two mechs getting one another off via cables. Or possibly spark merging if they really were relaxed, she thought with a shiver, though that was usually more private simply out of the need to protect such a vulnerable part of themselves. Great. Just great. Single, broken-hearted, horny, and getting to watch two older than dirt over-smexed mechs get off on what she couldn't have. She knew Ratchet meant well, but sometimes they could be so completely dense. She should have brought a fishing rod along so she could have at least had something to occupy her time while attempting to ignore them.

The melody of Ratchet's transformation came from behind her even as she watched Ironhide do the same a few hundred yards in front of her. The green mech scooped her up unceremoniously and deposited her in the gap in his armor between his shoulder plating and neck, strapping her in with a silicone sheathed cable as he walked toward the weapons specialist.

"Took you long enough," Ironhide rumbled by way of greeting as Ratchet stood next to the taller mech.

"Didn't know you would be here," Mikeala explained, feeling inexplicably anxious about where the afternoon had suddenly landed her.

"Ratchet didn't tell you?" Ironhide asked, shooting a glare at the medic, his cannons spinning around once in annoyance.

"Tell me what?" she asked suspiciously.

"Mr. Walking Weapon here seems to think that you are in need of what you humans refer to as rebound sex," Ratchet explained dryly even as Mikaela tensed and froze.

"What!" she shrieked when she finally found her her voice, reaching down to unhook the cable holding her onto Ratchet's shoulder and scrambling down his frame with well practiced ease so she could cross her arms and glare up at both of them. It was a good thing she had been doing her kegels or she might have wet herself in shock. "What the fuck!"

"Calm down, girl," Ironhide commanded, kneeling down to look at her on a more even level. "Your systems are running so hot it's a wonder you don't spontaneously combust."

Mikaela's fists clenched in fury and, to her horror, she felt hot tears in her eyes. They had obviously heard the content of her arguments with Sam. Of course they had. It wasn't like the mechs' audios would have been weak enough not to hear what the two had been screaming at one another. And now, on top of losing the first guy who had really loved her, she was being mocked by two bastard-fucktard-machines who couldn't keep their audios off. "How dare you!" she hissed. "So what, you can't keep your fucking audios out of our arguments, so now you are mocking me?"

"What?" Ironhide roared, standing up suddenly and backing away, his cannons whirling again as he raised his hands in objection. "No! Oh, frag this, I'm too old for this slag, Ratchet. You explain it to her."

"Explain what?" Mikaela yelled, whirling to face Ratchet, tears streaking down her face. "That you know why Sam dumped me? What he accused me of?"

"Mikaela," Ratchet said cooly, in the voice normally reserved for mechs who were losing it in Medbay. "Please calm down. I do not wish to have to sedate you. You are misunderstanding the situation entirely. We are not mocking you."

"What the fuck are you doing, then?" she asked miserably, not able to look at either one of them as she pressed her fists into her eyes, trying to get the tears to stop.

Ratchet vented and said something high and piercing in their own language to Ironhide, who promptly pulled out two glowing cubes and a much smaller bottle from subspace, handing one of the cubes to Ratchet. Both mechs sat down, one on either side of her. Ironhide, almost sheepishly, if he could ever be described as sheepish, handed her a bottle of Jack Daniels.

She grabbed it, but continued to stand, glaring back and forth at the two mechs on either side, and didn't take a drink when the other two did.

"Mikaela," Ratchet began in a far gentler tone than he had ever used with her before. "I'm sorry that we have further upset you. That was precisely the opposite of what we intended. You misunderstand our intentions. We are not mocking you. Yes, we know what you and Samuel have been arguing about. And we know that your former mate is correct - that you are physically aroused around us and not around him. How to respond to this has been a puzzle to us. We don't monogamously bond the way your culture is inclined to believe it should. There is nothing wrong with arousal. What is very wrong, from our point of view, is allowing someone we care for to become so wound up, and doing nothing to help out. But to have done so, or even to have offered, interfered with the social norms and rules of your pair bond with Samuel, as far as we could ascertain."

"You're part of our cohort, girl," Ironhide added, sounding intensely exasperated. "We take care of our own."

Mikaela forced herself to close her mouth, which was wide open, and collapsed onto her ass between the two giants.

Both were looking at the river, not at her, but she could feel their sensors trained on her, their spark fields making the hair on her arms raise as they overlapped with her in between. She didn't try to say a word, but instead unscrewed the bottle and took a very large swallow which burned its way down her throat and made her cough. Without a word, Ratchet handed her a bottle of water, which she gulped down, before taking yet another drink of the whiskey. She tried to focus on breathing normally, lowering her racing pulse, and, most importantly, stopping her tears.

The mechs continued to wait for her, silently. As old as they were, she had come to understand, they had no issues with protracted periods of silence and inactivity.

"Ok," she finally said when she could trust herself to speak without crying. "Let me see if I've got this. You can tell that I get turned on when I work on one of you, and barring Sam, you would have been offering to get me off."

"That is a simplistic explanation, but yes, that is essentially what we are saying," Ratchet replied evenly.

Mikaela took another drink to fortify herself. "Why?" she asked, plaintively, sounding as pathetic as she felt.

Ironhide turned his head and looked down at her as though she had grown a second head made out of turkey bacon. "Why wouldn't we?" he asked, incredulously.

"Um, let's see, because I'm a fucking human and you are...not...human?" she tried to explain, but even to her own ears, she sounded ridiculous and pathetic.

A low growl came from both of the mechs, a dangerous sound that made her gut twist in a mixture of fear and the same shameful desire she felt every time she could smell a spark.

"Why in Primus name would it matter to us that you are a human?" Ratchet asked archly. "You are part of our cohort. That means something to us, Mikaela. But if you find the offer offensive..."

"No!" she objected. "Shit!" she exclaimed, standing up, pacing in front of them, her body whirling in a chaos of arousal, frustration, shame, and excitement that she had no ability to control or understand. "I'm...I'm not offended. I'm just...this is just a hell of a lot to swallow, right after what just happened. I...I never expected that anything remotely like this to happen."

"Nothing has happened," Ironhide grumbled, "other than you showing, once again, how tightly wound you are and just how much you need to overload before that charge starts to melt your circuits, along with how glitched your kind is when it comes to physical intimacy."

She took another swig of the whiskey, ignoring Ratchet's look of disapproval. "Were you planning on getting me drunk before having your way with me?" she said shakily, trying frantically to ignore the way her hands were trembling, the heat that was settling between her thighs and the way her heart seemed to be skipping beats.

"Blame that on lug nut, there" Ratchet said, reaching to extricate the bottle from her hand before she dropped it. "I instructed him to bring you some fuel. Somehow that translated into his half-clocked processors as human high grade. And no, I would much rather you be sober and enjoy yourself. That is all we are offering. You are part of our cohort, you have been physically frustrated and in emotional pain, and we want to help."

"Help. By having sex with me. How does that even work?" she asked weakly, knowing that she had already given them their answer.

Ratchet and Ironhide gave one another a look that was downright raunchy before turning back toward her. Ratchet raised his optic ridges and Ironhide held out his hand to her in invitation. "Demonstrations are always more satisfying than explanations," the black mech said in a tone that could only be called dangerously seductive.

"Oh fuck me," she whispered as she began stripping out of the leather of her riding gear and running back to the waiting hands.

"Oh fuck! Oh fuck yes! Oh my God, don't stop, oh fuck me!"

Mikaela'a upper body was writhing in Ironhide's hands over his unlocked chest, tendrils from the corona of his bright white spark reaching out between the plates to lick against her naked skin, each touch making her entire body tingle. The silicone-sheathed cables normally used to hold her in place on a shoulder were wrapped around her breasts, and holding one of her arms above her head while her other hand rubbed along them frantically. Her legs were spread wide by two of the same cables, and Ratchet's broad face was in between them, his glossa large enough to cover her entire crotch as he explored every inch of her folds with the nimble, smooth appendage.

Both of the mech's frames shook in barely contained amusement and arousal at her exuberant and demanding shrieks.

A specialized cable containing a half million microscopically fine filaments extended from Ratchet's wrist. "Want to plug in, sweetspark?" Ironhide asked in Ratchet's stead since the CMO was otherwise occupied. The cable had been designed to give Ratchet direct neural connection to their human allies in life or death situations on the battlefield. It just had never occurred to Mikaela that it might have another, far more intimate use. Ratchet and Ironhide's own ports were wide open, and their cables began seating themselves in both their main thoracic interface panels and the subpanels located under their pelvic plating.

She froze for a moment, her eyes widening as she realized what they were offering: to share sensations, to feel what each were feeling, at least as well as her own brain and body could process the sensations. The technophile in her, which was already doing cartwheels like Boots the Monkey, began doing backflips as well. Why hadn't she and Sam broken up sooner? Fuck it! Why hadn't they said screw convention and culture and just joined in on what was nearly always going on in one form or another on base, barring battle or recharge?

Ratchet paused, pulling away from her, making her whimper and try to grab onto his face with her legs.

"It is only an offer," he said, far too gently, mistaking her expression for reticence. "We are curious about what this feels like for you. It will help us make this even more pleasurable for you since your interface systems are so different. There is nothing dangerous, but don't feel obliged to consent," he said carefully, reaching out a hand to stroke her wildly strewn hair.

Mikaela almost cried. Now was not the time for careful, patronizing explanations; she was so fucking close! "I said don't fucking stop!" she hissed, lunging at Ratchet's face with her legs and reaching her one free hand to grab the offered cable, holding it to the back of her neck where she knew, from having seen it in use, the nano-filaments would painlessly integrate into her brain and central nervous system.

"Smart girl," Ironhide rumbled, his chest plates cracking a bit wider to allow more tendrils from his spark to snake around her even as Ratchet's nano-filiments made themselves at home. The first burst of shared sensation had all three making a variety of noises that sent all the native wildlife fleeing. Accompanied by a loud rev of his engine, the CMO's glossa did a figure eight around her sex before plunging in, a single thrust sending all three over the edge.

She might have passed out. Or perhaps died and gone to heaven. She wasn't sure. The next thing she knew it was dark, though plenty of heat was radiating from the plating she was sprawled out on like some nude model in an automotive calendar. Then she heard a familiar, much-loved engine, accompanied by an even more familiar ozone scent, followed by a deep baritone voice as another mech pulled up next to them in his alt form. "Please excuse the interruption," Optimus said before he transformed and stood tall, silhouetted by the full moon, gazing down on the lurid scene with bright optics. "I understand a member of my cohort is in need of what her species has designated as 'rebound sex'."

"Oh fuck me," Mikaela whispered, her heated face breaking out into a broad grin.