Disclamer: not mine, of course, all the usual
Thanks to Nagia for the usual sounding-board-beta madness and LadyDragon for a last-minute readthrough.
Movieverse, post ROTF AU
The base was easy to spy on, even compared to the usual pathetic Autobot bases. Human-built sheds of flimsy metal sheeting might be enough to keep the weather out, but had any number of entrances for a small, dexterous symbiote to come in, and the drop ceilings in most of the base provided excellent hiding spots for a lightweight flyer to conceal himself. Ratbat kept himself powered down, recording audio passively and leaving the base through the ductwork to transmit the data he'd gathered only every three or four days. He'd need to leave soon to fly back to base for more fuel and to report what he'd found, but for now, he had found an excellent location one room away from the Autobots' main gathering area and his small energy readings would go undetected in the higher-than-baseline energy emissions from the crazy engineer's lab. Today, it was the lab he was listening in on, as the recreation room was filled with nothing more interesting than some bots- no one interesting- drinking energon and a few of the squishy soldiers playing a game involving sharp projectiles and a round target.
"Don't worry, Sam- look, it's less embarrassing than going to Ratchet. If he finds anything, we'll deal then." The dark-haired squishy femme had her hand on the door- he could see them through the vent above the entrance to the engineer's lab, but hadn't opened it yet. "When he's involved in a project, I'm pretty sure you could run naked across the lab screaming and he wouldn't notice. Even if you talk to him, he forgets about it 10 minutes later in favor of his latest invention!"
"I guess, if you think it's the best idea." The other squishy- Ratbat stifled a hiss- was the one who had destroyed the Cube. He was holding onto the femme's hand. "Do you want me to come with you?"
"Very sweet, Sam. You're a crappy liar. Go harass the twins in the rec room or something, I'll be there in a few minutes." They kissed (squishies were so weird) and separated. Ratbat carefully moved across the duct to where it turned a corner and another vent blew cooled air into the lab area. If the squishies were up to something secretive, he wanted to know about it.
The angle was bad. He heard the door open and saw the femme walk through, but once she was past the doorway, he couldn't see her or the engineer that he knew was in the lab.
"Hey 'Jack." The femme's voice.
A clunking noise- a tool being dropped?- and a returned greeting that came back too distorted by angle and distance to understand. Ratbat extended a microphone from his wing cautiously, threading it into the ceiling vent. Better. He'd missed something, but they could get it off the recording later with some filters.
"Of course. Am I scanning for anything in particular? I need to wait for this to cool before I begin assembly anyway."
"Er.. Let's just call it a personal problem and anything different than the last time you scanned me without asking?" The femme was embarrassed and squirming. It was delicious, even if not as much as when the male did it.
Another clunk, something being put down. "Mikaela, if it is something medical, I am hardly qual-"
"It's not! It's probably nothing, in fact, and I don't want to bother him when he's busy. Or at all. I'm not exactly wrench-proof."
"Alright, then." A pause. "How interesting. There is All-spark energy, all through your system- there was a bit previously, when you brought the shard for me to scan, but nothing like this. Have you handled it recently?"
Squishies with All-spark energy were definitely a good piece of intel, especially when it was one of the squishies who were on the Big Boss's shit list for Mission City. And no one had known where the shard that the little traitor Wheelie had been sent after was- the femme's workplace and home had been well-guarded ever since they'd gotten in the first time.
"No. It's someplace safe- I haven't touched it at all, not since-"
"Yes, of course. May I?"
"As long as there's nothing explosive up there."
"I promise, it's entirely disassembled. I just want to scan more closely and that is easier to do when you are standing on the table."
Ratbat decided to chance an additional probe and extended an optic line. The squishy was standing on the engineer's workbench next to some components that might belong to a missile launcher. Wheeljack's headfins flashed green, then gold as he scanned with a blue and then a green ray.
"Mikaela, I believe you should let Ratchet scan you as soon as you report to him for your shift. Perhaps my files on human physiology are incorrect, but it appears that you have a spark in your chest."
"I what?" Ratbat only barely stopped himself from crunching the bit of duct work he clung to between his claws with glee at the shock in the human's voice.
"If I had to theorize, I would say that contact with the All-Spark and its shards is changing you in some way. Simple proximity hasn't seemed to harm anyone except for Samuel and I highly doubt you have ingested any of the Shards, but perhaps dust inhaled after it's destruction, or other particulate matter..." Wheeljack puttered to a stop. "As I said, I'm no medic."
The femme was rubbing her head in a gesture that Ratbat thought meant confusion in most of the squishies he'd watched. "Yeah, of course. I'll ask Ratchet. Can I get a lift down?" She asked.
"Oh, of course. Watch out for the back plate, it's only just cooling. Did I tell you that I am working on a missile that will use solar power to fly ten times as far as our current ammunition and deliver the same explosive force? I simply need to-" the engineer offered his hand to the squishy to step into, which she did without hesitation, hopping off again as soon as she reached the grey concrete floor.
"That sounds really cool. Thanks 'Jack." She made some sort of face, Ratbat wasn't sure his pattern recognition algorithms really understood squishy facial expressions, and waved. He sucked the microphone and optical probes back in as the squishy walked out of the lab. Climbing deeper into the ducts, he mentally weighed the odds of following the squishy (which would involve both going outside in broad daylight and finding a way into the medbay, which he hadn't scouted yet) versus returning to base with incomplete information.
This would be enough to keep him from getting slagged, and might be worth an extra cube of energon or two. He clamped his claws more firmly in the support beam, wrapped his wings around himself, and shut down to recharge with all systems powered down except for his chronometer. Escaping the base would be easiest at sunset, when he could blend in with the smaller squishy species that circled around the base lights catching insects.
She caught Sam's eye from the doorway- he was watching Epps and his squad play Halo- and smiled with a brief head-shake.
"Everything's okay?" He was already up and walking towards her.
"Nothing to worry about at all," Mikaela smiled. There were times that she appreciated how oblivious Sam could be and this was definitely one of them. "I need to get to the medbay, though. My shift starts in 10 minutes. What time are you meeting Bee?"
Sam held the rec room door open for her as they turned down the hallway towards the front of the building. The converted hanger had been divided into two sections divided by a wide hallway, with Wheeljack's lab and the rec room on one side and a computer workroom and a storage room on the other. "Not 'till noon. He's got some sort of assignment till then. Want me to walk with you?
"If you want, but you don't have to. It's already hot out there."
"It's not a long walk." Sam smiled and held the outer door for her as well. Not even 9AM and it was already like walking into an oven outside. The medbay took up the whole interior of one of the smaller hangers, and Sam left her at the door to return to the Halo tournament with a kiss.
Ratchet was already in the medbay when she opened the door and stepped in, which was not unusual, since Mikaela sometimes suspected that didn't leave at all most days. There was a piece of armor on the table in front of him, but he wasn't working on it.
"Wheeljack is not nearly as absentminded as you and Sam seem to think he is, particularly when it comes to childish subterfuge. What exactly is going on?"
Oh shit. "I, er-" Of all the times to catch Sam's foot-in-mouth disease. Ratchet broke his usual 'no grabbing the humans without permission' rule and scooped her up, setting her down on her feet on the nearest berth. "I didn't want to bother you?" Clueless got Sam out of everything.
"I am a medic. If you don't want to come to me, you go to a human doctor. You do NOT ask Wheeljack to scan you and then ignore the information he gives you as a result, and I can tell by your face you had NO intention of asking me about his findings." Colored light flickered over her. "What did you think needed scanning for in the first place?"
Mikaela wasn't sure if this was more or less humiliating than the worst case scenario her imagination had been spitting out for the last three weeks before deciding on less, slightly. She briefly considered defending herself- she HAD planned to tell Ratchet. Later. But that definitely wasn't going to fly, and denial was Sam's coping strategy, not hers. "I was late." She didn't say it loud. Ratchet could just turn his damn busybody robot super-hearing audio sensors up.
"Late for what?"
Mikaela bit back her initial response, which was to tell Ratchet to just fucking google it, because he would. "Late. For. My. Period. Three weeks. Bought a test. It was negative, they're not always correct. I was scared, okay, and Sam deserved to know because if there was a decision to make, I wasn't going to make it for both of us."
Ratchet looked at her silently for a very long moment. She wasn't sure if he was accessing the internet, or scanning, or what, but the silence sucked. Just as she was about to throw something out just to break it, Ratchet spoke up again. "You're not pregnant. You are missing several internal organs, which have apparently replaced themselves with Cybertronian components."
Now it was her turn for the long pause. "What?" She stopped again, trying to think through her initial baffled reaction. (Ratchet hated stupid questions and yes, he was sure, no, he wasn't joking, because he would have said if he wasn't and he didn't joke about medical stuff.) She finally settled on a specific question- the pause probably wasn't as long as it felt in her head. "Which internal organs?"
"At a guess, anything your body isn't currently using- appendix, spleen, reproductive tract, part of your liver- or which is redundant- your left kidney appears to be missing. There are nanytes through most of the rest." Ratchet spun around, grabbing a tall stool off the worktable where she'd been sitting yesterday to work on a project and plunking it down on the berth next to her. She sat. "You've also acquired a filtration pump, and a spark chamber lodged between your heart and your right lung. "
"Shit." Her phone buzzed in her purse, and she ignored it. She hitched her feet up onto the rung on the front of the stool, folding her arms across her knees. "So what now?"
"There's an entire pile of plating by the washrack that needs to be scrubbed down for reclamation, there's a shipment of supplies to inventory and put away, and Ironhide is supposed to be coming in for a coolant change at 1400, which he'll cancel at the last moment." Ratchet said.
"In other words, business as usual, boss?" She bit her lip and pulled herself together. Ratchet put a hand on the table- palm down, not offering her a lift down, just a gesture of support and closeness.
"Do you need to take the day off?" The utter lack of sarcasm in his tone probably would have surprised some of the 'Bots, but Mikaela had spent enough time dedicated to Ratchet-watching (while not in pain, undergoing medical procedures, or drugged out of her mind on painkillers, which she thought probably put her ahead of the bots on percentages, if not accumulated hours) to recognize the honest question when she heard it. Reading the 'Bots' faces was difficult, but their body language was as expressive as humans' when they weren't facing down a combat situation. Ratchet's eyes- optics- were lighter than usual- more white than blue, which seemed to be a marker of intense emotions.
"I'd rather keep busy, I think." She got out, and got to her feet.
"Alright. Let me know if you do." The moment ended. Ratchet took his hand off the table and straightened up. "Start with the inventory. I'm going to do some research, but I'll be available if you have any questions."
"Right." Mikaela nodded, walking to the edge of the table and swinging over the edge onto the ladder to the ground. Back to work.
Ratchet joined Wheeljack in his lab, pulling a container of softly-glowing violet high grade from his subspace as the metal door rattled shut behind him. It was third shift, and the base was quiet.
"How did the inquisition go?" Wheeljack cleared enough room on the top of the workbench for the container by shoving the parts lying there to the back, and pulled a pair of empty cubes from his own subspace. "I researched while I attended the teleconference this afternoon. Nothing in my databanks even remotely applicable." Wheeljack was assisting the command staff in hashing out exactly what technology could be safely shared with the humans.
Ratchet groaned and filled the cubes. "About like you'd expect. Slagging organics. This is what comes of NOT scanning organisms with pathetic self-diagnostic systems that only return a result of 'fine' unless they're bleeding or have been blown to bits.'"
Wheeljack lifted his drink in a toast, taking a sip before replying. "You have to admit it's fascinating. The Cube simply hasn't been exposed enough to higher-level organics in proximal contact to have predicted any such thing, and-"
"Predicted, hah!" Ratchet said.
Wheeljack had a suspicion that Ratchet might have had some high grade before coming into the lab. He'd rarely seen his friend this upset about a patient that was still online.
"I scanned Sam. He's affected too. Poor kid just can't catch a break when it comes to us."
"Oh yeah? I know he's special, and crazy brave, and apparently brought Optimus back from the dead, but he's a good kid, Ratchet- Polite and a lousy liar, but he's a good friend to Bee, too."
"Primus, I don't even want to think about Bee's reaction to all this." Another swallow of the high grade. "I'm not sure if he's going to be horrified or overjoyed."
"It will increase Sam's odds of surviving any future Decepticon encounters." Wheeljack pointed out.
"That's just it, though. He shouldn't be HAVING Decepticon encounters!" Ratchet rose from the bench where he sat to land a fist in the support column at the end of the workbench. "He gets back to normal after Mission City and the damn Allspark starts dumping visions on his head. He has a nervous breakdown in class, gets captured and tortured by Megatron for information- Scalpel is still unaccounted for, by the way, which makes me nervous. He slagging DIES for Optimus in Egypt, and now this! He's not even a quarter-vorn. If he were Cybertronian, he'd still be talking in beep code and being fed energon jellies."
"The Aerialbots were less than that, the first time they flew in combat." Wheeljack replied, staring into his cube. "Primus help them all." Ratchet hrumphed a noise of agreement and topped off both cubes.
"Now you're just being maudlin."
Alarms blared through the base. It was 4AM, and while 'Bots in recharge indisputably roused faster from recharge than human soldiers could from sleep (the lack of clothing and body armor to apply helped), there was still a degree of controlled chaos for the first few minutes of any alert.
/Report?/ Optimus had been recharging, for once, but was nearly to the monitor room by the time that the all-clear sounded. Jolt was on monitor duty, with Ironhide the officer on call. /Prowl, Sunstreaker, and Bluestreak are inbound from orbit, with damage and low on power. They've gone silent to try and shake pursuit. / Ironhide added audio to broadcasting on the main officers' frequency as Optimus entered the room. "Projected landing coordinates in southwestern Idaho, with company. Epps' team is on standby and the C-130 is undergoing preflight. They've been dodging Seekers since they broke into orbit."
/Ratchet, Ironhide, Jolt, Sideswipe, Bumblebee, you're with me. Epps' team for NEST. Wheeljack, Mudflap, and Skids will remain n the monitors here. Roll out in 10 minutes./