Note: Very few of these one-shots will be interrelated. Each are written in five to ten minutes and polished up for public viewin', minus spell-checkin'. Enjoy, and please try to leave a review.

It had been quiet for the most part. The Decepticons had retreated earlier than usual to lick their wounds. Those in the medbay were recharging peacefully, the night patrol had left hours ago, Red Alert had eventually conceded his traditional after-battle place before Teletraan's monitors to Blaster, and Jazz had eventually convinced his mate to stop hovering over his gunner counterpart.

With First Aid doing duty in the medbay, and the twin terrors knocked out for the night, Ratchet tried to kick-start his elusive relaxation pattern into first gear. However it just wouldn't come to him, and he knew why; someone was watching him. They had been for a while now. Ratchet had hoped they would get bored and wander off. He had no such luck.

Shaking his head in annoyance, the medic dumped his empty energon cube in the recycle unit before exiting the common room, intent on checking on his patients and ditching his follower before catching up on the ever-growing stack of files that needed signing. Passing down the large corridors of the Ark, paranoia kicked in, and he could have sworn a giggle just wafted from the shadows. He paused for a moment, turning around in an attempt to find the culprit.

No-one was there.

Had Ratchet been an ordinary medic he would have shaken his head and wandered off, certain that he was just overstressed. War had seen that habit quickly dropped in favour of checking over his shoulder struts at frequent intervals; living with the particular mechs aboard the Ark had finely honed both that habit and his aim.

However, the wonts of separate mechs like over-the-strut glances were common knowledge amongst the crew, and Ratchet's prowler was no exception as the medic could find nothing out of the ordinary. An internal grumbling started up as he continued on his way, and many threats passed through his CPU, most involving old junk parts and well-placed wrenches.

The medbay doors slid silently open to admit him, and he stepped far enough into the room that the doors wouldn't clip him as they shut again. He stood there for a moment, silently watching in approval as his apprentice moved gently about the medbay, cleaning tools, moving scrap metal to the refuse chute for later use, checking each of the wounded. Leaving his occupied intern to his job, Ratchet swiftly crossed to his office, letting the door whisk shut behind him. Sighing, he rested his helm back against the door.

It never got easier to put those hooligans back together once they had gotten their body parts blown up or off. He was thankful that, so far, getting themselves blown up was the worse they had done, unless one counted Wheeljack blowing himself up. Still, Ratchet couldn't help but show a furious or blank face to his crew mates when retreating to his office to 'calm down'. It wouldn't do for him to be in public when he let his mask slip and allowed the exhaustion to show, as he was doing now.

Pushing himself away from the door, he moved towards the desk sitting in the middle of his office. Ratchet glanced over his shoulder at the door, a thoughtful expression breaking through the exhaustion. He almost expected someone to be sneaking up behind him, wished that he had been able to catch whoever had been tailing him from the common room. He stared silently at his reflection before he noticed something odd; he ended up doing a double-take. His back was a distorted reflection in the metal of the door, but it was impossible to mistake what was written there.

The paint was faint in some places, suggesting that the miscreant responsible had pulled back in a hurry, and the letters were wobbly, as though written upside-down, but the bold black words sprayed on backwards were easy to read in the reflective metal of the door.

THANK YOU

Ratchet's optics narrowed slightly before relaxing again, an amused peace crossing his face plates. Oh, it wasn't going to be fun to strip the paint from his back, and he was certainly going to give the demon responsible a good threatening, for he had a general idea of the identity of the culprit, but... Shaking his head he smiled, turning back to his original target and the pile of work needing completion.

Yes, that rogue was in for it the next day; Ratchet would dust off his oldest tool just for the occasion. For now, though, even if the methods used of showing it weren't always orthodox, Ratchet was content to know he was always appreciated.

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Silver