Title: Armed And Engined
Rating: T-ish
Universe: Bayverse
Characters: Ratchet, Ironhide, cameos from others
Pairings: implied Ironhide/Ratchet
Warnings: A bit of violence and maybe nonexplicit gore?
Written for mmouse15, for the 2013 TF Gift Exchange on Dreamwidth. :3 Now that we have officially been de-anoned, I'm posting it here.
Cybertronian Units of Time:
Vorn– Orbital cycle; Cybertronian year. [roughly 83 Terran years]
Lunar Cycle– Cybertronian month. 26 lunar cycles in a vorn. [three years and four months]
Quartex– Cybertronian week; 4 quartexes in a lunar cycle. [Roughly 10 months]
Orn– Rotational cycle; Cybertronian day. 23 or so orns in a quartex. [Roughly a fortnight]
Joor– Cybertronian hour. 52 joors in an orn, give or take. [roughly 6 and a half Terran hours.]
Armed And Engined
Night, long and clear.
He's planetside for once, terra firma under his aft, solid rock at his back, his helm tipping back enough to look up into a cloudless sky. Stars wheel above him, the wash of the galaxy a glittering band stretching from horizon to horizon, almost directly overhead. There is a familiar EM signature huddled at his side, drawn in tight and controlled, exvents washing warm over his plating.
It's peaceful, until cannon fire splits the night with a flash of pulsar-bright purple, a thunderous roar shattering the atmosphere.
Ironhide rolls his optics. It's that or let the medic notice the faint shudder in his plating.
At least he knows they're safe, for the moment. It's not aimed at them, or they'd be dead. From the sheer strength of the discharge he guesses the 'Cons have someone with a dedicated artillery altmode out there – Sixshot, maybe. It's happened each night they've been staking out the fortress, same place, same time – he checks his chronometer, and sure enough it's mid-joor.
Light, weaker and more distant, spills from behind the curtain wall of the massive fortress that rises up out of the side of the valley at his pedes. His optical filters don't give him the colour of the emblem that's painted over the main doors, but he doesn't need sight to know it is the same purple. The Decepticons have evidently been here for a long time.
They don't seem to realise they've been discovered.
Ratchet is silent beside him, and that strikes him as intensely wrong. He's not known the medic for long – long by his standards, that is, a few vorns at most – but in that time he's never known a Ratchet who couldn't come out with some pithy remark, frothing with his trademark sarcasm. He'd been mouthy enough during the mission briefing, interrupting Mirage twice to argue a point he'd disagreed with, but almost the minute the SpecOps mecha had headed off down the valley, he'd shut off his vocaliser. He's not heard a peep from the medic since.
There has to be a way to reassure him. Ironhide isn't good at the subtle stuff – he's heard every joke they make about his cannons, and is savvy enough a mech to accept they're mostly true – but he searches his arsenal anyway, wondering what might work on a wonder-medic with a bark every bit as bad as his bite.
He's almost settled on a battle plan when Ratchet's ID sig flashes on his HUD. Non-relayed comms, almost impossible to detect – he'd taught Ratchet that trick himself.
::They're due back in two breem:: the ping says. ::I don't see any sign of movement.::
::Don't start worryin' 'til they're overdue:: Ironhide sends back. His glyphs are rougher around the edges than Ratchet's, traces of an offworld accent he just can't seem to break. ::Actually, don't start at all. Makin' schedules for SpecOps is just askin' for 'em to be broken. Stayin' alive is more important to them.::
::It's not to you?:: Ratchet says dryly.
Ironhide grins – that's the Ratchet he likes to hear. ::Well, it's third on my task list::
Ratchet shakes his helm, just enough to be seen in the darkness. Like Ironhide, he has his optics dialled down as dark as they go; they glow only faintly, enough for Ironhide to pick him out of the gloom but not – they hope – for a patrolling Seeker to catch sight of them.
For a major Decepticon fortress, this one is surprisingly lightly guarded. Given its precarious perch on the side of the mountain the Seeker patrols make sense, but had it been Ironhide in charge he'd have had grounder patrols out as a backup. Sure, Seekers are fearsome war machines, but an aerial vantage point only saw so much.
He thanks the Decepticons for their oversight, and wishes the retrieval team godspeed.
Beside him, Ratchet's servos tap quietly against the medic's thighs. Ironhide gives him a warning flare of his field, and he stills obediently.
::Very well:: Ratchet says eventually, and there's a catch in his field, a hidden cost to the words. ::I will be patient.::
Ironhide isn't sure what the cost is, but he's slagging well sure he's going to find out.
The night rolls onward, the deadline comes and goes.
There is no sign of the retrieval team, nor their commanding officer.
Ratchet glares down at the fortress, as if by sheer force of will he could split it open and pluck Jazz from its depths. He's nominally the commander of this Pit-damned venture, by virtue of being the highest-ranked mech on the team. Ironhide might be the more capable soldier, but the most rank he holds is Body Sergeant. Ratchet as Commanding Medical Officer outranks him by several tiers.
It really should be Mirage in command – and technically Mirage is, as Jazz' First Lieutenant and the leader of the retrieval team. But the weight of responsibility is not so easily lifted, and Ratchet feels it bearing down, a pressure like gravity, seldom noticeable but there enough to feel it when it presses down.
Jazz as TIC outranks Ratchet in turn, but as he's currently enjoying the fruits of Decepticon hostility down in the valley, he hardly counts.
Ratchet can't wait to get him back, so he can hand over this blasted responsibility to someone with more military experience. He's never been a soldier, never aspired to be one. Causing injury is not in his coding, it goes against every line of programming in his moral core. He has no fully-integrated weapons in his frame besides the laser cutter in his palm and his forearm saw, and those two started life as surgical tools. Sacrilegious as it felt to modify them for combat, Ratchet knows he needs them.
Ironhide beside him is little more than an indistinct shadow, but if he looks closely he can see the faint glimmer of the metal around the frontliner's dulled optics.
He's grateful it's Ironhide here with him. The solid warmth of the old soldier's EM field is a familiar comfort he finds he has to concentrate to keep from clinging to like a frightened newspark. Ironhide's a warframe – all this is in his coding. Ratchet's seen how deep it goes. All this – the battle, the worry, the waiting – is normal stress for him.
It's reassuring, in a way. It means they aren't out of their depth yet.
He exvents, long and slow, with the help of a lazy spin of his fans. It does nothing to expel the nervy charge crawling along his lines, but the breath of cool air into his internals feels good. Ironhide gives him a long look, and he returns it with interest, narrowing his optics until the old soldier looks away. He's not sure what he means by it, but if there's one thing his long, long life has taught him it's that there's no point in overthinking things like this. Ironhide hasn't run away yet, after all.
Movement bursts upon them, three silent forms with a fourth, limp body slung between them. Blaster fire flares and crackles, catching on the crystalline ground and lighting up silhouettes of the retrieval team – and the pursuing shapes of red-opticked Decepticon grunts.
Ironhide surges up out of the shadows, slides his bulk in front of the running spies and opens up with his cannons. The specialised joints in his elbows and shoulders bear the recoil, twin dull whumps echoing around the bowl-like sides of the valley. Two Decepticons go down, one screaming with a bite-sized chunk out of his side. The other is silent – it's pretty hard to scream when you no longer have a neck and head to scream with.
This is what he's made for, combat and pain and killing. That's the definition of a warframe – that's what makes him Ironhide, right down at the core. It makes him an odd Autobot, one who's never quite been as at home with the cause as he maybe should be, but Ironhide has made his peace with that. He's a weapon. He'll make himself into a tool of protection, of hope, of peace.
He's got a good idea of who he wants at his trigger, when the time comes.
Ratchet calls out for him through comms and he thinks he hears it through his audials as well. He pauses – not long enough to get himself killed, as if any of these half-bit dungeonwalkers posed a danger to him – long enough for a quick proximity scan, shifting his optical filters to infrared.
There's a glow like the heart of a star building up down in the valley, and he's been Weapons Specialist long enough to know what that means. He fires, once, twice, thrice and four, turns tail and throws himself off to the side as the gunformer shoots and a swathe of crackling plasma cuts through the ground where he'd been standing with enough power to vaporize solid rock. He feels the wash of heat over his plating, the shockwave of superheated atmosphere.
He'd love to stay, but realistically, it's not a good plan. Ratchet and the retrieval team are calling through shortrange comms for him from the other side of the ridge. They'll need someone to cover their afts, to make sure they all get back to the shuttle in one piece. (Or in however many pieces Jazz is already in, but that's Ratchet's prerogative to worry, not his.)
The gunformer fires again, but by that time Ironhide is already gone.
***
The Ark picks them up over the middle of the Panthalassa, the ship's guns ready and charged for trouble. The caution is not needed – they'd left behind the last of the Seekers somewhere over the coast, a hundred kliks or more ago.
Jazz is the first taken from the shuttle, Ratchet shedding his command like adolescent plating as he steps into the bigger ship and back into his own world. The medical staff hurry the SpecOps CO to the best of the Ark's three surgical theatres: Ratchet managed to stabilise him on the flight homeward but he's not sure how long his emergency repairs will keep Jazz alive. Like so often is the case with severe injuries, it'll probably depend on his own internal vitality.
Jazz is every bit as much a fighter as Ironhide, or Optimus Prime. Ratchet tries not to be worried, but his spark has other ideas.
First Aid, Flatline, Greenlight, Hoist. Ratchet himself. Between them they lay Jazz out (on two separate berths, one for the torso and the other for the legs), hook him up to life support and get an infusion of spark-grade energon into his drained reserves. First Aid takes a solvent wand to his internals, and pinkish muck, burnt-out self-repair nanites, comes trickling out between what few external armor plates he has left.
There's a shadow at the edge of the room, Ironhide settling himself by the door. Ratchet catches his optics for a moment, earning from the black mech a little work, it says.
He huffs a sigh, and buries himself elbow-deep in Jazz's shattered chassis. There will be time for all that later, he tells himself. He can't afford to be distracted while he's saving lives.
But if he's honest with himself, it helps.
***
The door slides quietly, his servo resting against the aperture frame. He steps into the room, it shuts and locks behind him, and suddenly Ironhide is holding an armful of medic.
"You did well," he says, because it bears repeating. "He'll live?"
Ratchet nods, his field flaring out, tangling willingly with Ironhide's. It makes clear what he won't say out loud, his hopes and fears and all the worries he's been sitting on without an opportunity to let go of for far too long. Ironhide knows he needs it, this nameless thing stretching between them. They both do, really.
Today, it's Ratchet's turn to be weak, Ironhide's turn to be strong. Tomorrow it'll be the other way around. That's the beauty of it. They can break if they need to, and be safe in the knowledge that the other is always there to glue the pieces back together. They're both old, they've watched the world march onward around them for a long, long time.
And it will be a long, long time yet if Ironhide has anything to say about it.
"I'm glad," he says simply, lowering his head, resting his forehelm against the crown of Ratchet's head. Nothing is sure, and he won't ever make the mistake of treating it as if it is. There's a lot he himself isn't sure of, but he'll keep working at it. Ratchet's worth it.