Re-uploaded to fix some errors, and in honor of the continuation of this little thing. It was SUPPOSED to be a one-shot. Bananabird decided otherwise. *glares*

Chapter 1: Beginnings

The explosion rocked the building William Lennox and his handful of NEST soldiers were taking cover in. They didn't hesitate to pop back out of their crouches and open fire on the 'Con that had them pinned, using the advantage their small size gave them against the metal giants they had been training to fight ever since Mission City. It was NEST's first major engagement with Decepticons, nearly seven months after the Battle of Mission City, and despite all the hard work they had done, they were not quite prepared to handle direct combat. At least, the new guys weren't. Those soldiers who had been there in Mission City were doing better, but not by a whole lot.

Another missile slammed into their building and they ducked down to wait for the debris to stop flying before shooting back.

/Lennox! Your cover structure is unstable! Evacuate immediately!/

Lennox was already starting to signal his men to fall back, opening his mouth before Ironhide's voice had faded from his earpiece, but before he could finish the command another missile brought the wall down, and the rest of the building was quick to follow as they scrambled out of the way. Most of them made it. One of them didn't.

The piercing, agony-laced scream was difficult to miss by anybody in audio range. All three Autobots on the field heard it as clearly as if they'd been standing right next to the unfortunate human, but only one was close enough to respond to the sound.

/Man down! Man down!/

In a streak of neon green, Ratchet was beside the rubble of the building before the NEST soldiers had finished picking themselves up off the ground, ears ringing. Ironhide and Optimus redoubled their attack on the two 'Cons, giving the medic and the humans the cover they needed to dig their comrade out.

"Anderson! Anderson, can you hear me? Are you conscious?" Lennox demanded as the four humans and one Autobot frantically moved pieces of building. A low, pained moan was the reply, but the unfortunate soldier didn't need to answer at all.

"My scans show that he is alive, but severely damaged." Ratchet reported crisply. "He will live if he gets to a human medic very soon."

"Field medic's en route, but I don't think he'll get here that fast with those two Decepticreeps still givin' us Hell." One of the other soldiers reported.

Ratchet carefully removed the last piece of wall covering the unfortunate human and ran another scan. He was bleeding from a major laceration on his left arm and another on the back of his head, as well as numerous other smaller cuts. In addition he had a moderate concussion, both bones in his left arm were broken, his right foot was crushed and that leg was also broken as well as seven ribs in about 13 places. His left lung was punctured and filling with fluids and his liver was ruptured. Burns marked the exposed skin of his hands and face and what wasn't exposed was covered in severe bruises. It seemed Anderson had caught a good bit of the missile explosion and the full brunt of the resulting building collapse.

"Then I will take him out of danger and meet Dr. Johnson away from the battle." Ratchet decided. He reached for the severely damaged human, and then hesitated. "Help me get him into my hands."

Lennox moved beside the medic to stand guard while the other three tried to move their comrade into Ratchet's hands without hurting him more than he was. Ratchet couldn't help but run constant scans over the fading organic, and so he couldn't help but watch exactly what happened inside Anderson that made him scream and pass out when they moved him.

Bones slid and scraped against their jagged, broken edges, digging into flesh they were never meant to touch, rupturing arteries and veins alike, piercing organs further and sending electrical impulses of pain across every neuron like a tiny fireworks display. It was over in only a moment, but watching it in real-time on every spectrum of sight and with his processing speed made it last breems for Ratchet. Blood stained his green hands as he cupped the broken life form in them, staring, watching the damage spread within his body with something akin to awe. His tanks lurched painfully as his spark began to realize something his processor had known since the instant he had scanned the first human he had met.

Intellectually, he had realized that the organics were not as hard to harm as they were. The most external protection they had was the armor they made for themselves, and even that was woefully lacking. Their internal structure was beautiful in its complexity and construct, but so easily damaged that it was laughable. Their bones, the very things that gave them any sort of form other than blobs of flesh and blood, were nothing more than mineral deposits and organic fibers.

He had known, in his medical processor, that humans were terribly fragile. But he hadn't let that touch his spark until now, holding one so terribly and easily wounded in his hands with the knowledge that a single wrong move could end his entire existence.

And suddenly, Ratchet couldn't move.

Something of his internal horror must have made its way onto his face, because it was Lennox patting his wrist that pulled him out of the compulsive scans.

"Don't worry, big guy. You got this." The man reassured him softly. Ratchet nodded sharply, gathering himself and rising to his feet, about to contact Dr. Johnson, when a missile warning popped up on his HUD an instant before one of the NEST soldiers yelled, "INCOMMING!"

The humans hit the ground and Ratchet leaped nimbly out of the way, allowing the missile to pass over or beside them harmlessly and explode against the next building over. Ratchet shielded the human in his hands as best as he could, trying his hardest to not do any further damage, and promptly hurried away from the danger after a quick scan to be sure nobody else had been harmed by the shrapnel of the explosion.

He met Dr. Johnson a short ways away and they found somewhere sheltered for him to work on the soldier where he wouldn't be in danger of stray explosions. Instead of hurrying back to the fight, though, Ratchet crouched down next to the human medic and watched carefully, helping when he could, but mostly learning. He'd been absorbing information from the human internet about treating such wounds, and had asked quite a few questions of his human counterpart, but had not as yet had much opportunity for hands on experience.

No, that wasn't true, he corrected himself. He simply hadn't sought those opportunities out. He had left the treating of the humans to the human medics, and he had taken care of his 'bots. It was something he was going to correct, right now and in the future. And perhaps, he mused, he should let that correction go both ways.

Tasking a portion of his processor to planning out how he was going to remedy this situation he had brought on himself, he focused back on the procedure before him and quietly conferred with the human doctor on how to save their soldier's life.

~0~

Ratchet sat, still as a statue, and watched the men as they worked at him with their brushes and buckets of water. Plans were already laid out and ready for Cybertronian sized wash racks, but even after all this time, with so much happening and the feasible alternative of having the humans help, actually building them had been set on one of the backburners. The Cybertronians had been a little leery of the idea when it was first presented, but once Bumblebee had assured them it wasn't as weird as they were expecting it to be they had decided to give it a go. And it hadn't been and they were used to it by now, but Ratchet found himself staring at his helpers again, as if their presence was strange and new. In a way, it was.

There was a human on his shoulder, perched to scrub determinedly at an energon stain trailing down onto his back. The medic eyed the situation, calculating. It was about 10 feet to the ground from his shoulder. It wasn't terribly high, but at best if the man managed to land on his feet should he fall, which he frankly wasn't likely to, he would get off with a sprained or broken ankle. At worst, if he landed on his head, he could very well break his neck or at least suffer some brain damage.

Ratchet switched focus to another soldier working at the grit in his hip joints and panels, though he kept a wary scan on the human balanced on his shoulder. So far they had been fortunate to only have a few fingers and hands pinched in joints the whole time they had been interacting so closely with their small allies, but as the fearless soldier dug in to clean out the joint the medic silently brought the specs for that joint system up on his HUD and internally grimaced at the pressure he could so easily and accidentally put on the man's hand, should he rotate his torso so much as an inch to the side… Enough pressure to turn his fingers into a bloody smear between the gears he was trying to clean. And humans couldn't just replace limbs the way he and his people could. It would change his entire way of life, to lose a few fingers, never mind if he lost a whole hand.

With the precision he had been taught and made to absorb as second nature with his profession, Ratchet focused on each soldier cleaning him in turn to catalogue what sort of danger they were in, simply from being in such close proximity to his chassis. The danger was substantial, if conditional, for all of them. And yet they carried on, as if unaware that such danger even existed, or didn't care if they did know. It was, quite frankly, ridiculous to the Autobot and he was seconds from shooing them all away before something tragic happened when the human he was watching looked up to return his gaze with a frown.

"Is something wrong, sir?" he asked respectfully.

Instantly the other four men halted and looked at him expectantly. Clearly, his scrutiny had not gone unnoticed. Ratchet hesitated, and then shook his head. "No, Private Murdock, nothing is wrong. You may proceed."

The five humans exchanged clearly skeptical glances before either mentally or physically shrugging and going back to work, all except for Private Murdock, who had finished with his area and was looking for something else that needed cleaning. Murdock had been there when Anderson had been injured, Ratchet remembered, and Murdock obviously remembered as well because his gaze quickly fell on Ratchet's hands.

The man's eyes went wide and he spoke before he could stop himself. "Oh! Sir! Your hands…"

All eyes turned to his servos where he was using them to brace himself against the ground, leaned slightly back. He didn't need to look to know what had shocked the Private. After making sure nobody was in any danger from the movement, he sat up and brought them forward anyway.

Rusty red stains still marred the green paint of his hands from the battle yesterday. He had kept the marks as a quiet reminder of why he was planning to medically integrate their forces, but he was ready to let them go now and so he held his hands out so Private Murdock could clean them off. To his surprise, the man stared for a moment longer before gingerly reaching out to place a reverent hand on one of the stains and looking up to meet the large mechanical being's optics. There was a startling amount of solemn understanding in those brown eyes, and the moment stretched out until Ratchet nodded.

Private Murdock pulled his hand back to pick up his bucket and pour some of the soapy water over the medic's hands and start scrubbing away at them. The other men followed suite, resuming their own cleaning, and they all worked in silence for several moments.

"Sir, if I may ask, is there any news on Anderson?" Murdock eventually wondered quietly.

Ratchet vented. "He'll most likely live, though Dr. Johnson had no choice but to amputate his right foot to make way for a prosthetic. He will, however, require a lot of time to recover, and it won't be easy."

Murdock nodded. "It never is, sir."

"No, it isn't really, is it." The medic murmured, almost to himself, as he watched the tinted water run off his hands and onto the pavement.

~0~

The week after that engagement Ratchet had just finished molding a new armor plate for Ironhide when there was a knock on the post of the roll-back hanger door that was the entrance to his med-bay. It wasn't much of a med-bay. He'd certainly had better, and remembered the facilities and equipment he'd had access to back on Cybertron with a pang, as always, but at the same time he'd recently been accustomed to much worse. Primus knew the reaches of space were woefully lacking in medical centers. So, it would have to do.

By the time the medic turned around he had already identified the handful of humans standing at the entrance to his jealously guarded domain (as pathetic as he once would have considered that domain) by their unique bio-signatures, but he greeted them as if he hadn't. It had not taken the Autobots long to realize that their ability to know who was standing behind them without looking unnerved their small allies, and so had made an effort to pretend they couldn't. Usually Ratchet didn't bother pretending, as he didn't come into contact with enough new people to 'weird out' a significant percentage of the base's population on a regular basis, but this was different. After all, if things turned out the way he hoped they would, at least some of these humans would end up as part of his medical team.

"Ah, Private Murdock, you're right on time. Welcome." He gestured the man and his fellows into the converted hanger as he turned back to put his work aside, and then Ratchet turned his full attention on the group of humans, regarding them critically. After a moment of nervous shifting, Private Murdock spoke up.

"So, uh, you wanted to see us, sir?"

The medic nodded sharply and knelt to be closer to their level. "All of you present have some mechanical background, do you not?"

There were some confused glances exchanged and hesitant nods all around and Ratchet repeated his sharp nod before rising to his pedes again. "Follow me."

He led the men deeper into his med-bay, deeper than any of those who had been there before had ever gone, and stopped when he reached what passed for his office, really just a section with a desk that was slightly blocked from the rest of the open room by a piece of large equipment. He turned back to the men following him and abruptly projected a hologram of a simple mech, scaling it down to their size and rotating it so they could see from all angles.

"I'm going to lead off with a disclaimer that Cybertronian anatomy is not as similar to your automotive vehicles as you might expect." He started as he lowered himself to sit on the ground, meeting each gaze that eventually turned to his from the hologram. The mech he was projecting split apart into his constituent components. "But it is similar enough for you to have a basis of understanding due to your previous knowledge of such."

Expressions of surprise, astonishment, and even dawning awe began to appear on the faces of the humans before him. He shut the hologram off and gave the men a sternly appraising look. "It has come to my attention that I could use a few extra hands around here with some of the simpler repairs I have to do. If any of you would be amenable to it, I would be willing to teach you how."

There was contemplative silence for several moments as the humans thought about that, and Private Murdock was again the first to find his voice. With a poorly concealed grin and a gleam in his eye, the Private stepped forward. "Sounds neat. Where do I sign up?"

Ratchet smiled back, and it was the largest and most honest smile any of the men had ever seen from him. "You just did."