Three more days slid by. Ratchet finally got a half shift off on the second day, and by the third, a respectable web of cabling and conduits was beginning to take form between wards five and six as the DC techs hit their stride. He lost Wheeljack and his team to them then, but he did not miss them as he would have earlier: for with their medical field techs back from the front lines, and no additional casualties, the frantic pace became more benign. Ratchet didn't have to watch hourly over every patient ward six berthed; he didn't have to make every decision on an overcrowded ward, and since he wasn't on surgical rotation yet, all he had to do was keep his 'bots stable until the surgeons could pry enough parts loose to handle them. He even had time finally to get patched – being a medic did have its perks when it came to queuing for repair work.
If only he hadn't the "Barrage incident" to deal with, too, it might have been as close to normal as he'd known since the invasion of Praxus. Ratchet had duly submitted his after-action report to Flicksaw, to which he had appended the events in ward five, all of it composed with a maximum of efficiency and neutrality. The CMO had logged it received, and added that they would speak later about ward five, Flicksaw having still more than enough to preoccupy him. But rumor, free from such constraints, moved far more quickly than the CMO.
Rather than confront him directly, though, it mostly hovered in the background. The more cognizant of his patients were as polite as discomfort, grief, and weariness with being injured allowed, but not every awkward silence could be blamed upon such, and certainly none of the not-quite-covert-enough scans or quiet berthside conversations broken off upon his approach. The messages from the sergeancy in his queue had a different tone, too, from the last "incident."
Well done, read one, but don't let it be luck.
Or again: Good impulse, bad decision – keep it simple 'til you know what you're doing, and stay out of the way of the MPs.
Next time, take the head shot if you get it, read a third; Nobody worth his marks wants that kind of mayhem on his conscience or his record.
That one stayed with him like a bad day.
"How badly is this bothering you?" Flashflare asked him at one point, as the two of them sat and did some long overdue tending to themselves. Having finally caught up on just enough rest not to be staggering about on-shift, they sat in the surgeons' quarters, checking over tools and repairing damage, getting the recalcitrant gritty fluid stains out from where they oughtn't to be.
"I'm not falling apart, if that's your concern," Ratchet answered, frowning as he scrubbed gently at a clot that'd gotten lodged between components for his screwdriver and the trigger mechanism on the gun.
"I could say the same of half a dozen patients at this point."
"Only half a dozen?" he murmured, with absolute disinterest.
His brother's engine whined in exasperation. "Ratchet, you can't just keep – "
"I'm fine."
Flashflare vented. "Of course you are," he said, resignedly, as he reformed his scanner back into his hand, and flexed his fingers. But he nudged Ratchet with a shoulder guard and said: "Look, I've got to take a turn on surgical. You want to talk, though, comm me."
Ratchet gave a non-committal rumble, and continued fussing at the dirt and minor damage. He didn't comm.
Another three days passed. Ratchet watched the daily fatality count drop to zero. Everyone was holding steady at last; parts were being recycled, were getting shipped out and finding their way into bodies that needed them, and the 'bots themselves were finding their way back to their barracks and squads and out of the wards. The tension on the base relaxed appreciably.
So it was only a matter of time before Flicksaw called him in to discuss ward five.
"We'll skip the complaints from Logistics," the CMO told him without preamble as the two of them crossed the threshold of the senior medical officers' workroom. "Consider yourself reprimanded for flagrant violation of protocol. I'll be adding a week of salvage to your duties – not that you'll know the difference given all our schedules for the next month!"
"Yes, sir," Ratchet replied, dutifully.
Flicksaw vented, engine churning with irritation as he surveyed the room, which still showed signs of projects hastily abandoned when the call had come in ten days ago. But then with a shake that rattled his armor, he settled himself at his console, and motioned for Ratchet to sit as well. When he had, he continued:
"Instead, we'll focus on the complaint from the MPs." He tapped a panel and a report that had the MP's insignia on it lit up on its holo-screen. The text on the screen was oriented to Flicksaw, not that that presented any great difficulty to a species with trans-scanning technology. Nevertheless, Flicksaw reoriented it to Ratchet, though he didn't give him but a moment even to glance at it.
"I cannot disagree with it, nor with the assessments of several of the sergeants I've had review your report and the recordings from ward five," Flicksaw informed him, canting an optical ridge. "You're not expert enough to refuse to take a lethal approach. If you couldn't accept that, you should have let the MPs handle Barrage."
Well, at least that was refreshingly direct, a point Ratchet could appreciate in light of Jazz, even if he really wanted nothing more at the moment than to vent – hard.
"Sir, with all due respect to the MPs and their concerns, the risk was not so unreasonable," he argued instead. "Barrage was injured and disoriented: half his targeting – "
" – was trained on you, as the nearest threat."
"He didn't kill me," Ratchet said urgently.
"The point," Flicksaw replied, oppressively, "is not that Barrage didn't kill you. The point is that all you had on your side was luck. You had no back-up plan, no support, no real control. And you were working triage! You didn't even have a medically defensible rationale: your own report listed Quickstart as code one and deteriorating when you reached him."
At that, Ratchet just looked away, and clamped down tightly on a rather sharp retort which would have gotten him another black mark, undoubtedly, and probably sent down the ranks to tech grade and a refresher in triage protocols.
Always assuming, of course, that Flicksaw didn't simply cut him loose entirely.
"I take it that you will not contest the reprimand, then," the CMO said to his silence after a few moments.
"No, sir, I will not."
Flicksaw rumbled at that, but there was a dissatisfied note to it. "You will not contest, but don't in fact agree," he read that response, and cocked his head at Ratchet, seeming somewhere between incomprehension and amazement. "He was a code one, Ratchet – "
"Sir, I had no other patients," he cut his superior off – rather to Flicksaw's surprise, to judge by the flash of his eyes. "Not 'til Amtek got hit. And had he not been hooked up to Quickstart, he would've been a stable code three, even with the damage."
"And I repeat: Quickstart was a code one, so why didn't you strip parts from him and use them on Amtek?" Flicksaw demanded.
"Because this is a back-line ERB, sir, not a designated front-line combat zone, and Quickstart had fifteen years of military experience that the next 'bot off the line will not have."
"So you put Amtek in worse jeopardy based on the fact that no one had designated ward five a front-line combat zone?" his superior concluded, clearly incredulous.
"I kept him in life support capacity despite the risk to himself because designated combat zone or not, ward five was a fully equipped emergency repair ward set among five other fully equipped emergency repair wards, and we need every medical hand we can save," Ratchet replied.
"An admirable justification, though one hardly consonant with the fact that had Barrage managed to take that point blank shot, you would've lost us two medics," his commanding officer said pointedly.
"As I said, sir, the risk wasn't as high as it might appear."
"That's your tactical assessment?" The archness of this question wasn't lost on Ratchet, who shot back with perhaps more force than was warranted from a third grade surgeon to the CMO of the entire Autobot corps:
"No, sir. It's my medical assessment."
Flicksaw stared at him, eyes ablaze with Ratchet dared not guess what feeling, but he stared right back, unwilling to give any ground. Not when he'd already said he wouldn't contest the official assessment. The CMO continued to watch him awhile longer, then gave a low rumble, and said:
"So noted."
The way he said it – perfect monotone – it was impossible to tell whether that was a good or a bad thing, and Ratchet, having perhaps stepped back from the cliff's edge, decided not to push his luck any further by asking. So: "Thank you," was all he said. Then: "If that's all, sir...?"
"Not quite." Flicksaw flicked his lights on, and Ratchet felt a scan crawl over his plating as the other scrutinized him. "How's your arm?"
"A little stiff," Ratchet replied, but then shrugged. "It's giving me no trouble I've not had before."
"But it still does trouble you?"
Ratchet was silent a moment, considering this, and considering, in fact, that he really hadn't had any difficulties that he couldn't blame on exhaustion exacerbating matters. The past few days, in fact...
"Not as often," he said, frowning a bit, feeling a thrill of surprise. "I think... I think I'm improving."
Flicksaw grunted. "I hear," he said at length, vents fluttering just a bit, "that you've been speaking with Jazz."
Ratchet, who had still been mulling the implications of the possibility that finally he might be getting back to normal functioning, now stared at his superior, puzzled by this non-sequitur and also vaguely alarmed, though he'd no idea why. Maybe it was the look Flicksaw was giving him; or maybe it was just the name Jazz... "We've spoken once, after the battle," he confirmed, though he also added: "I didn't contact him, he just... appeared."
"Yes, he does do that," Flicksaw growled, sounding displeased. "I assume someone gave you the access code to his medical file – the part of it that isn't classified for special ops?" And when Ratchet hesitated, the CMO flared his vents. "Everyone in medicalreads Jazz's file; it's not a leading question."
"I've seen it," Ratchet admitted, though he did not name his source; Flicksaw was clearly agitated about something, and Ratchet found he didn't fully trust his mood.
"Then you know to stay clear of him – especially after your first meeting, you don't need to invite him to make problems for you."
Ratchet cocked his head. There was something more there, he thought, but for the life of him, he didn't know what. Flicksaw was staring at him now with an indecipherable light to his eyes, but it made Ratchet uneasy. Not that he doubted a word the CMO had said, but...
"He wasn't making problems for me. He... " Ratchet hesitated, all to well aware of his own suspicions, but feeling, for whatever reason, compelled to charity. "He seemed to want to be... helpful."
"Tell that to the last of his victims," Flicksaw muttered, but then waved away his own comment to warn: "Don't take him at his word, and don't let him feed you rumors. Half of what he says is a lie anyway."
"He's special ops."
"And if he weren't, he'd be wiped and reformatted to a more stable personality inside of an hour. For that matter, if Optronix didn't claim him, we'd do it anyway," the CMO vented.
"Is he truly that valuable, to let Optronix have that much discretion with him after so many demerits?" Ratchet ventured to ask, for admittedly, he had wondered. Flicksaw's plating flexed outward a bit, as if he'd gotten something unpleasant and staticky caught in his coils, but then his engine gave a resigned little growl.
"Jazz is, unfortunately, quite as good as he thinks he is, at least when Optronix has disposal of him." The CMO shook himself, then pinned Ratchet with a look: "He gives you problems, you get someone else to deal with him, clear? I don't need my staff getting jailed or injured for his amusement."
"Yes, sir."
"You've got enough of a gradient to climb if you want that combat medic rating," Flicksaw stressed; "Don't let him blow your chances for you on one of his schemes."
As advice, there was nothing objectionable to it,
"I've no interest in his games," he assured his superior, though not without a stab of unease. He was well aware that Jazz still had a hook laid in him, however tenuous, and he'd no notion where its line led or why. Or when Jazz would choose to pull it.But that was Jazz's affair – he wasn't pursuing, and he certainly had no plans to take up his bizarre offer. "Is that all, sir?"
Flicksaw waved him tiredly away. "Dismissed."
But once Ratchet had left, Flicksaw, with an audible grinding of gears, opened a comm line, and put a comm-code through. After a moment, its owner spoke:
"iOptronix here./i"
"Optronix," Flicksaw growled, "I want a word – about Jazz."
