Chapter VI
. . .
The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
-Oscar Wilde
. . .
"I've gone over every last nanobyte of information on you and that brat and every single fragger in, on, or around Cybertron with a story similar to yours," Jazz started. "You're not the first to claim insanity or the first to be made go insane." He pulled up a datapad with a three dimensional scan of Moonlight's body. He zoomed in, singling out the hastily stitched together metal surrounding Moonlight's spark. "The only fraggin' reason I'm even considering your wild-aft story is because of that mess of a body you're wearing. I pulled your medical records, mech; I traced back the vital parts of you to a worker that died in a factory explosion almost a quarter of a millennia ago. The rest of you is a mess of scrap parts and slag."
Moonlight stayed silent, trying to refrain from his optimism. Was it possible that someone was actually taking his story seriously?
Meanwhile, Jazz continued. "So I thought to myself. Why would a walking scrap heap of a genius suddenly turn idiot, saving potential witnesses and leaving survivors where he didn't before? Why also would that coincide with that same monster claiming that he'd been victimized by a sadistic bodysnatcher masquerading as some random spoiled brat?"
Moonlight tried not to take offense at all the adjectives Jazz used, because hope, a long forgotten bubble within his chest, began to rise for the first time since he arrived at the caves. Someone knew.
"It's because it's a pattern. Every few centuries there's some genius mad scientist that starts raisin' Pit all over the planet, talking about how he achieved a cure for every death-sentence disease mechanized beings have and killin' bots en mass and generally being a menace to society before disappearing or being found dead by a force unknown to the High Council and all planetary police forces."
Jazz again raised the rifle and aimed it at Moonlight's spark. "Explain, mech. Or I'll offline you where you are."
. . .
"So I told him the short version. I'm the spoiled brat. I'd been searching to a way to reverse this. I'd played a role in the recent explosions on three of Cybertron's moons in my quest for revenge. It's my fault Vincentus offlined. All I wanted at that point was a night of recharge and proper fueling."
. . .
This had been Moonlight's home for several years now, but the furnishings bore witness to a much longer history. The whole foxhole was one large room, lit by an ancient yellow electric light and carved from a smaller cave tunnel, simply furnished with a cot, a table, a chair and a cabinet. The cot had been a gift from a Cybertonian miner Moonlight had guided back to civilization after his navigation was blocked by high concentrations of lead. The table and cabinet had been borrowed from an abandoned shop located on the land up above the tunnels. The chair was a repurposed cargo hold from back when Cybertronian transports still used steel to make shipping containers.
It was on this chair that Jazz finally sat down on when Moonlight finished his story to contemplate.
"I need to take a drive." Jazz stood abruptly and walked out.
"Jazz. Jazz!" Moonlight was overcome with injustice and struggled with the cuffs. "You can't just leave me here!"
. . .
"But like the aft he was, he did."
. . .
"Okay, skidmark, here's the sitch." Jazz strolled back in half a joor later like he hadn't almost abandoned his mission just to avoid the dilemma he was faced with. Moonlight stopped struggling with his restraints. "You're a death row convict. I take you back now, you die."
"I'm waiting for death," Moonlight let the other guy blurt out flatly before he could stop it.
"Excuse me? I'm saving your sorry aft by taking a chance and believing that your wild glitchy story has some merit to it because I can't risk losing all evidence and information about the real suspect."
"What?"
"You heard me, glitchbrain. Stand up."
Moonlight did so, trying to wrap his mind around the fact that someone believed him.
Before he unlocked the electromagnetic cuffs keeping Moonlight immobile, Jazz pulled out a syringe and stabbed it into Moonlight's main energon line. "Nanobot trackers," he said.
"A leash," Moonlight shot back with a frown. Nanobots could be used as a navigational tracker, but they could also incapacitate by cutting off Energon supply to vital processes and inducing medical shutdown. They were only used in the most extreme circumstances because they were so expensive to manufacture. Moonlight felt both degraded and honored.
. . .
"I mean come on. Doubt was to be expected but why did it have to be so demeaning?"
. . .
The cuffs came off and vanished into Jazz's subspace. Moonlight rubbed at his poor chafed wrists. "Can't take a chance on you escaping, mech. Pack your slag. You're coming with me."
. . .
"The bot made sure I knew my place. Said so several times that if I stepped outta line, I'd be offline before I hit the ground.
"He disabled my GPS and anything else that was useful, put a fake spark signal on me— more technology courtesy of the government — and proceeded to drag my aft halfway across Cybertron. I had no idea where he was taking me after we left the Rust Belt. He refused to tell me.
"Let me spare you the days long wait of agony I went through: it was Ratchet's apartment."
. . .
They'd just passed a holosign reading "IACON: 3 KLIKS" and Moonlight was beginning to get anxious. They'd be passing the customs station soon and would be inspected for passports and licenses to travel and probably some other identification.
Or so he thought. They came to a stop at a transport station. Moonlight's anxiety skyrocketed for a moment.
Jazz shifted into bipedal mode and waved at the captain on the second floor. That was all. The guards at the gate opened it and let him pass without further hindrance.
Even after the station was no longer in sight, Moonlight could hear the energon pumping furiously in his audios with fear, thinking that any moment, those agents would come racing after them.
But he followed Jazz, just as he'd done for the last few cycles and finally, at long last, the pair stopped in front of a tired-looking medical hospital. The paint was cracking and dingy. Several windows were covered in spider webbed fractures and one near the top had only a tarp to keep out the elements. The sign read "IACON W. RE AIR SH P" because some of the letters had shorted out. It was a hospital for the lower working class, members of the population who held "respectable" jobs that didn't threaten the health or safety of its employees (most of the time).
In other words, a poor mech's hospital.
"Heeeeyyyy, doc bot, you busy?" Moonlight overheard Jazz say into his comm. "I need to call in a favor."
. . .
"Lo and behold, the soon-to-be greatest medic of our time walked out the doors of this lowly hospital. I gotta say, I have a lot of respect for him. He was the first mech to show any sort of regard for my physical state."
. . .
Head Medical Officer and Lead Surgeon Ratchet's apartment was smaller than Moonlight would expect of such a high ranking medical official. High quality, yes, but far from large. His captors had left him in what appeared to be the spare recharge room, locking the door from the outside. That didn't stop the conversation they had from leaking through the cracks. Moonlight forfeited a little more of his dignity to put his audio against the crack between the wall and the door.
"You brought him HERE, Jazz?! After I specifically told you NOT to bring any more convicts to me?!" Ratchet did not sound pleased.
"I know. Trust me, I know and I am sorry and I promise this is temporary. He just needs repairs, Ratch, he's a walking scrap heap."
"No. If he's walking, he's fine. He's a criminal, Jazz, on death row no less. Put him back."
"Back where? He's wanted all over Cybertron. No, Ratchet, please— just look at him. Look at how many different parts went into this body. He isn't even the same mech and there are so many things wrong with him I don't know how he's even—"
"Jazz. I swear to Primus, if this comes to bite me in the aft, I'm going to start a war just to make sure you die."
"Aww Ratch, I knew I could count on you."
"Shut your face, Jazz."
Moonlight jumped away from the door when he heard footsteps heading toward him and slipped. He was on his aft when door slid open.
Ratchet entered the room like a predator ready to devour prey that was already in a cage. He didn't seem to notice the lack of dignity as he scanned Moonlight on the floor.
"Primus in a jar, kid. What'd they do to you?"
. . .
"Ratchet reminded me a lot of my femme creator. He acted crochety and old but, at the time, wasn't old enough to justify it. He wasn't even middle aged yet. Let me tell you though, the war may have taken everything from Cybertron but it didn't stand a chance against the Doctor. I met him again yesterday and he's the same mech. A little more tired and a little more worn, but the exact same spark as when Jazz showed up with a death row outlaw on his porch."
. . .
"Hand me the electromag driver," Ratchet didn't look up from the armor he was pulling off. Jazz handed it over wordlessly. Ratchet turned it up to its highest setting.
The last piece of shoulder plate came off with a loud metallic tear and Moonlight, laying on his stomach, flinched as a small fragment of the shoulder's nerve went with it. "Throw that in the kiln. Useless," the medic spat.
Ratchet had spent the last joor stripping Moonlight of all the armor he'd scavenged or been switched into. The amount of rust rendered each and every piece incapable of being repaired and Ratchet saw no use for them other to be destroyed as scrap. He requested that Wheeljack keep a kiln in the basement for...whatever it was that Wheeljack saw fit to use the tempered slag for.
Ratchet also recognized the signs of self harm that had been welded and reopened and re-welded shut countless times. Every time a piece of armor had accidentally been welded to the fragile metal skin of his proto form, he gave Moonlight a sympathetic look. Moonlight didn't see these since he spent most of this time under the influence of a tranquilizer and copious amounts of recharge-inducing spark medication. Ratchet could tell the welds had been cut and repaired all by the same rusted dagger and torch. He hadn't seen a case of self mutilation this severe in decades.
. . .
"When I finally came to for the last time and they were done with stripping my armor and putting a clean stock set back on me, Ratchet held out a helm piece, the final part of the set and told me he expected me to keep it in good condition. I knew what he meant. It was honestly one of the greatest gifts anyone's ever given me and I was so speechless I couldn't even tell him thank you.
"Of course, once all the rust was scrubbed off and joints oiled and infections cleared out, he told Jazz to get me the pit off his property or he'd call the police. Notwithstanding the fact that Jazz was the police, we left. Ratchet's one scary pain in the aft.
"The whole thing took a day, maybe a day and a half. I was out for most of it, so I've got no fraggin' clue."
. . .
Moonlight took one last long look in the mirror. He didn't look anything like himself— he was the bright orange of a construction worker with unpainted grey on his forearms. Construction workers were lower class citizens who couldn't afford to have anything but the essentials, which, in this case, included bright orange to stand out at night and in crowds as someone to be looked down upon.
Moonlight found he didn't care near as much about appearing lower class as he did about appearing normal. Or at least nearly normal.
"Nearly normal" was better than "outcast" and "wanted fugitive."
Before, he'd seen only the scientist and his mishmash of scrap and slag and spare stolen parts and his own self inflicted injuries. He saw the burn scars from the so many explosions he'd unintentionally been a part of (including the one that killed Vincentus— a long cloud of char across his back) and the rust from being so long in the damp, dusty, dark underground and bullet hole scars from a few miners who hadn't wanted his help.
Ratchet had even stabilized the spark attacks, for Primus's sake— something Moonlight hadn't even been able to do.
He didn't know how to vocalize the change that not having to look at the body of another that the scientist had killed affected him. He was grateful beyond belief and felt...lighter?
He didn't understand how, but "lighter" just felt like one of the right words.
He was deep in thought when the door to his room slid open.
"Hey skidplate, Ratch just gave you the all clear. Time to go." The total change in Moonlight's appearance seemed to affect even Jazz. Moonlight couldn't quite place what had changed though.
"Where is he?" Moonlight asked.
"What's it matter?" Jazz shot back, turning and walking away.
Moonlight knew a lost cause when he saw one. He was a menace to society— Jazz wouldn't just tell him where his friend was. "Nevermind," he said quietly. Hopefully he'd be able to express his gratitude some other way.
Hopefully.
Even as he followed Jazz out to transform and start driving, he totally doubted he'd live long enough to be able to tell Ratchet exactly what the new (albeit cheap) set of armor and repairs did for him.
. . .
AN: Hi. am tired. read and review my pretties :)
-tz