Unleash the Beast

Chapter 6: Reunion

*Time for a much more relaxed chapter, eh?

"Ooh, that's nice," Windblade murmured. "It's not an oil bath, but it'll do."

"What is this stuff? It's great!" agreed Backdraft.

The away team, plus Grimlock and Smokescreen, were now huddled up back at the Unit E outpost. Ratchet had handed out little cubes of Energon colored a strange orange hue that had been heated to help everyone warm up a little quicker. Whatever it was, it tasted sweet and rich and almost chocolatey flavored. Angelique, Brenda, and the IASO skeleton crew were all enjoying similar warm drinks thanks to the Unit E people who had brought them over to their place to enjoy a cup. Apparently, the two bases worked in conjunction, sharing data and helping each other on projects. That was how Angelique had gotten a radar scan without any working equipment (she'd wirelessly piggybacked off their equipment) and how Jack had known where to find Backdraft.

"Raf likes experimenting with taste when he's not busy doing coding stuff," Jack smiled. "He always felt it was a little unfair that you guys are stuck with, like, one food source and maybe just one flavor."

Grimlock chuckled. "Are we sure this kid isn't a Brewer? 'Cause that's pretty much their tagline back home."

Raf paused mid-sip to argue, "Kid? I'm twenty-nine! And a half!"

"Wait, really?" the Dinobot asked, surprised. "Huh. You look younger than that."

"I dunno. D'you think Alchemist might take non-native followers?" joked Smokescreen.

Windblade cheerfully shrugged. They'd seen a bunch of crazy stuff lately. She wouldn't put it past the Chemist Prime to really go outside the box when scouting for new recruits. Legends always said that was kind of his thing: doing something wacky, weird, or unique through chemistry was basically an application, or at the very least it put that person on his radar. She didn't recall any rules about actually having to be a 'bot to join his ranks, either, so Raf had a pretty good shot in her opinion. Anyone who could make a Cybertronian equivalent to hot coco had marks in her book.

"Hey, hey, I've got a Brewer friend back home. Can you share the recipe so I can give it to her?" begged Backdraft.

"Oh! Me, too!" Windblade agreed. "Witchfire would kill for a taste of this."

"Sure!" smiled Raf. "I'm glad you like it."

"It's so good, ohmygosh," Zodiac confirmed almost breathlessly, draining the rest of her befittingly tiny cube.

When her gaze went up on and locked onto Smokescreen's half-full cube, the Guardsmech put a hand over it to cover it.

"Ah, ah, ah!" he clipped. "Get your own refill, Tweety! You're not stealing mine!"

Zodiac made a huffy face at him. Smokescreen copied her in an even more exaggerated way. Zodiac scoffed, transformed, and hopped off.

Ratchet snickered, "She's rather like you, but somehow less obnoxious."

"Hey! Lay off!"

"Yup. The roast-master's back in business," snickered Bumblebee. "You and Zoe should collab. She's good at roasting, too."

"Really?"

"Yeah, she called Smokescreen a pretty princess once. Just, y'know, not directly," grinned the former scout, "'cause directly isn't usually her style."

"Hrm. Has prolific dictionary of curses, too," Frostbite informed him dryly. "Might need to wash mouth out after insult at Polarclaw."

"Woah, was it really that bad?" gasped Smokescreen.

Frostbite nodded "Hn" all while his expression warned and it was so much worse than you think.

"Zoe?" Smokescreen called, flat-toned and suspicious. "Did you 'borrow' one of Combustor's really nasty, X-rated insults again?"

Zodiac titled her head to the side as if to wordlessly say she had no idea what he was talking about.

"Uh-huh. That's a yes," he deadpanned.

Ratchet cast an impressed look over at Zodiac, who was helping clear up some of the shattered equipment Polarclaw's body had accidentally smashed. After seeing her bite one of Polarclaw's digits right off his hand, she certainly did come across like the "biting" type when it came to verbiage, as well. He wasn't too surprised that Smokescreen had grown rather fond of her over the years. Feisty and intelligent paired well with him; and she'd proven she could handle him, which was a bonus. He had also heard from Knockout that Smokescreen had taken up a bit of a side occupation tagging along on Zodiac's away missions every so often. It was good to know he was opening his horizons up beyond merely "warrior," and if Zodiac was happy to nurture that, all the better in his opinion. He just hoped the X-rated profanities weren't one of the "skills" she was teaching him on those missions.

They spent the next hour casually chatting and catching up. Bumblebee was thrilled to hear that Raf and Jack were doing well, and that Ratchet was doing well. The old healer worked intermittently for Unit E as a special contract member, dividing his time between his home on Cybertron and his foster home on Earth.

The atmosphere itself felt like it warmed just from the friendly conversation, reminiscing, and banter. It probably helped that the Hunters had left, taking their supernatural chill with them.

"Hey, doc, do you wanna meet the others?" Bumblebee suggested.

"Others?"

"Yeah, the rest of the team!"

"So those readings we keep getting aren't wrong," Raf realized. "All those additional spark signals weren't prisoners or something. They're with you!"

"Yeah! I asked Optimus for help and he sent help! And they're all Relkana! Crazy, right?"

There was an awkward silence. Ratchet, Jack, and Raf all stared at Bumblebee through looks that said they though he really was a little crazy.

"I'm not crazy!" he protested. "I can prove it! Frostbite already proved the Relkana thing to you, doc! You saw the Hunters he called! That's his power! He's their Horn!"

Ratchet's doubt lifted somewhat. He wasn't so quick to deny his own sight. He even remembered a sparse handful of tales about the Wild Hunt that had been collected in the Iacon Hall of Records before its destruction. It wasn't madness to think that such stories had indeed been based on something real, rather than simply being fanciful imaginings. The Predacons back home certainly believed them. Optimus must have known those old stories, too, having worked in the Hall before being named a Prime. Funny how he had never mentioned the Wild Hunt in all the time he'd known him, though it wasn't as if the topic had casually come up in their conversations. He'd had many, many other things to worry himself about. Fragmentary stories hadn't been one of them.

"Don't call everyone," Frostbite warned. "Don't leave base unguarded, not with them hunting us."

"Them?" Raf repeated anxiously.

"I know, I know. Actually, the one I really want you to meet is our medic. Her power is something you'll find interesting, Ratchet."

Frostbite nodded approval to his plan. In fact, he was so adamant about keeping the base guarded that he left them to help do so. In his place, Charity emerged from the groundbridge, her new 'harp hanging from her hip. She smiled politely and waved.

"Charity?" gasped Ratchet. "Thank Primus! Knockout's been eating himself alive trying to find you!"

"Oh. I guess Sentenza's message from me hasn't gotten to him yet," she winced. "She is delivering quite a few, so I suppose some delay is to be expected."

"Sentenza?" the old medic repeated, baffled and worried in unison. "The Kaonian detective? And you mean to say they're both –?" he continued, eyeing Bumblebee sideways.

"Relkana? Yes," the younger healer confirmed. "I, um, may have left that out of my message to him..."

Ratchet let his bewilderment slide in favor of curiosity. Knockout's little protégé – now a legendary Relkan? Would wonders never cease in this post-War world?

"A-Anyway, it's a pleasure to meet you, doctor. Knockout's told me a lot about you," she smiled, holding a hand out. "I've read a lot of your research articles, too."

"Likewise, he's told me much about you," he smiled back, accepting the hand. "A rare thing for a vainglorious narcissist to talk so prolifically about anyone other than himself, though not entirely unexpected. Your research studies into tonal healing are fascinating. Knockout has been very insistent I keep up with each new publication."

"Thank you," she smiled. "It's an...unorthodox form of medicine but if it works it should be considered."

Ratchet turned more directly to her. "Rather curious that nanites, which have no external senses to detect sound, respond to it."

"I actually don't think they're detecting the sound," she explained eagerly. "The best tonal healing effects I found came from the subharmonics range. I think then that they're detecting the vibrations physically as they pass through the body, rather than hearing it like I'm currently hearing you. The higher the frequency, the less likely they are to respond to it, I found."

The old healer's eye glittered in intrigue. "So the vibrations act as a trigger for increased activity. Did you ever discover why? I'm afraid I'm somewhat behind on my reading."

"I did! Repair nanites all have a series of embedded codes that, for whatever reason, activate when exposed to these specific frequencies. And it's not a cascade response, like I originally thought. There is no hierarchy of command like in the human immune system. If a nanite feels the right vibration, they all respond together, in unison, obeying a quantum link we didn't know existed until my studies. It's..." Charity paused long enough to breathlessly smile. "...it's really remarkable to see when it happens under the microscope. There's no other word for it but mesmerizing."

"I believe you described it as 'watching every sunflower in a field suddenly, in perfect unison, pivot to the north' in your first report on the phenomenon."

Charity's smile broadened. "Yes! I know that wasn't the most scientific way to describe it but –"

"No, the image perfectly encapsulates the uncanniness of the response. A little poetry scattered into a scientific report isn't a crime," smirked Ratchet, "no matter what the peer-review editors think. I take it from Bumblebee's wording that your newfound power stems around this form of healing?"

"It does, but now it's supercharged. I've been trying to puzzle out how this upgraded version works and I think –"

Bumblebee grinned as the two jumped into a medical discussion. Eventually, he beckoned her into one of the other rooms to show him some project he'd been working on, and Raf jogged after them both. Jack remained behind to discuss repairing and replacing the IASO crew's equipment. Even though they weren't actually the scientists, merely skilled technicians left behind to take care of the place, both Jack and Bumblebee knew from experience with Ratchet that broken equipment tended to cause a lot of fuss. And that made Bumblebee put forth an idea to Jack. He knew Fix-It was having quite a bit of trouble decoding the Alchemor's firewalls, so maybe he could help repair some of the stuff Polarclaw had wrecked instead. That would probably be a less stressful task to occupy him until Windstorm got back from Aquatron.

"That would work, I think," the man agreed. "We can send a few pieces back with you to start. But what's this about a firewall?"

"Someone's doing dirty work on the Alchemor, we think," Windblade informed him. "Whatever it is, they're dead set on stopping us from snooping."

Jack's face become that same mix of troubled but thoughtful that Optimus had worn so many times during the War. He ran over to snatch Raf's laptop and began typing in search criteria. Over the years, Raf had developed quite the compendium of data on Cybertron, from people and culture to their legal system and various practices and procedures. His "Cyber Codex" should have the answer to his question.

Grimlock, curious, leaned over to look. "Whatcha lookin' for?"

"Who's usually in charge of designing, maintaining, and/or populating prison ships," he clipped back.

"So...who?"

Jack looked at him with that same perplexed look, only the troubled half was more pronounced. "The High Council."

"WHAT?!" the Dinobot thundered.

"Grimlock, I could've told you that from the start," deadpanned Bumblebee. "That's typical procedure. They're the ones who take the statements of police units and the Guard. Then they do the risk assessment based on the officers' and Guard's findings and then decide who's a big enough risk to warrant imprisonment on a prison ship. Which," the former scout tilted his head to the side, "does make me wonder how you got stuffed in the Alchemor. I wouldn't think accidental property damage was a high enough risk factor."

Grimlock shrugged. He hadn't exactly followed the legalese behind his sentence, too many big words, but there was some bias against beast-kind, he reminded him.

"Are you saying the top brass is crooked?" gasped Backdraft. "No way! Nuh-uh! Screwloose, my Councilor? He's an honest as they come! He's an a'almvus like me! The boss won't take anyone who's got a bad spark!"

Bumblebee and Smokescreen knew for a fact that the Iaconian Councilors weren't crooked either. Ultra Magnus himself had installed them soon after Iacon had been restored. They had both been trusted allies of Optimus himself during the War. Jetfire was a calm, collected scientist known for his many helpful advances to the Autobot cause. Elita-1 was a renowned Autobot commander, as cool under pressure as Optimus had been, and deeply respected for her strict moral compass.

"Not the whole Council, obviously," Jack clarified calmly, "but someone on it, for sure. Raf knows some of them are a bit...shifty, but beyond subversive behavior we don't actually have any incriminating evidence against any of the shifty members – not enough to hold up in a trial, and not enough to explain an advanced firewall. Until you can crack that firewall and find out what it's hiding, I'll have my guys help you find more pods. Unit E's got more scanning range than a busted up, broken-in-half prison ship that somebody clearly doesn't want you messing with too much. Finding more prisoners might help solve this," he finished, shrugging.

"Thanks, Jack," Windblade said.

Jack smiled, "I think it's high time you guys started working in earnest. It might give me and Miko a break."

"You've been going after prisoners, too?" she asked, surprised. "Funny. I never bumped into you people when I was working solo."

"We've only managed to re-capture a handful of them. Fowler wants this kept low profile, and since Unit E is supposed to be a 'classified, covert organization' to use his own words, we can't exactly go for any of them that are hanging out in cities like you guys can. Miko and I would draw way too much attention if we came in guns blazing in New York or Seattle or something. So we tend to go for the ones that are more...out-of-the-way."

"Oof," Zodiac cringed. "Yeah, that's fair."

"And that not bumping into you thing?" Jack continued. "That was on purpose. You had no 'Bot or 'Con identifier beacon. We didn't know who you were exactly. All we could get of you on scanners was massive energy readings, way more than anything we'd seen. You were targeting prisoner beacons, so that was Miko's hunch you were probably on our side, but Ratchet wanted to err on the side of caution. It was his decision that we probably shouldn't be tangling with someone carrying around enough core energy to nuke a small town."

"Oh..." Windblade blinked, awkward. "I'm sorry for scaring you? It's not meant as a weapon if that's what you're worried about. I'm not even sure it has destructive capabilities. I honestly never thought to try to use it that way."

"See that you don't," Jack warned casually but somewhat coldly.

Windblade jokingly saluted. "Roger that, Darby. No explode-y experiments. Cross my spark. I need to save this energy for Caminus anyway. I can't afford to mess around with it."

That was enough to get Jack's tense shoulders to relax again. His hand went up to his ear, whereupon he requested Raf back in the main room to help connect the Alchemor's functioning system to the Unit E network. In less than a minute, Raf came sprinting back into the main room. From the sound of music coming from the hallway, Charity was giving Ratchet a demonstration of the new photoharp to prove its merit as a Relkan's item. The old healer had never quite struck Bumblebee as an Earth music fan, but he had caught him listening to some Vivaldi and Bach on the radio a few times. Charity sounded like she was just as well versed with the old classics as more modern hits. He couldn't blame Raf wanting to stick around to hear her, but leave it to Raf to put the job first.

"Sorry! I'm here," Raf stated breathlessly.

"Work your magic for them, Esquivel," smiled the older man.

"I'm almost scared to see what little they've been working with..."

After gathering some stuff in a kit, and once Jack had given the others fair warning that a technician was coming through to help, Raf vanished into a groundbridge to the Crown City salvage yard. Grimlock and the rest of the salvage yard crew followed him through toting equipment for Fix-It to repair. That seemed to serve as the cue for everyone that their "hot coco break" was over and the little gathering of agents and technicians dispersed to go about their business. Many of them scattered into other rooms in the outpost, leaving only Jack to remain in the main room. With nothing else to do, he pulled out a report file and began to read.

Rafael remembered Omega One well. He'd still been impressed by the place despite Ratchet grumping about it all the time, always discontent to work with "primitive" technology, and forced to work with so little. So he was pretty happy Ratchet was back at the Antarctic outpost, because if Ratchet thought Omega One was sparsely equipped, this salvage yard was working with even less. All they really had was a groundbridge and the command console of the prison ship. They didn't even have a roof over their heads!

Ratchet would have had a seizure.

His eyes roved around to the left of the groundbridge portal. The command console itself looked to be in surprisingly good shape; someone had already gotten to it. His guess was either the orange mini-con currently at it, or that "Windstorm" guy 'Bee had mentioned. They had done a good job either way. Their work would make his job a lot easier.

He then looked to the right of the portal. It wasn't more stuff to mend or repair like he'd thought. It was a 'bot. A big, red and blue 'bot, sitting and staring, quietly perplexed at the sight of him. A big, red and blue 'bot who was supposed to be dead.

The toolkit dropped from his grasp. Rafael's eyes went round.

Without a word he sprinted back into the groundbridge, screaming "Ratchet! RATCHET!"

He ran right through the main room, down the hall, and peeled a corner so fast he nearly slipped on the cold tile. "RATCHET!"

Ratchet ran out of the room. "Rafael? What is it? Is something wrong?"

He was too breathless to answer right away.

"What 'Bee said," he gasped. "About Optimus. He's –!"

Thuds behind him warned the 'bot had followed him, and soon enough the 'bot in question arrived. Ratchet gasped, unable to grasp what he was seeing. His optics, he decided, were betraying him. What he was seeing could not be real. He – he'd seen him...afterwards – a little red wisp of light, wheeling through the city he'd once called home before vanishing completely. That was the last time Ratchet had ever laid eyes on him, just over two decades ago.

Shock quickly gave way to outrage.

"MIKO!" he boomed angrily. "If this is another one of your holographic pranks, it's in very poor taste!"

"This is no practical joke, Ratchet," insisted the figure. "See for yourself."

Ratchet flipped the special panel on his lower arm open whilst dreading that he would see the same thing he always saw next to his old friend's ID badge: nothing. He was shocked anew at what he saw. The color had come back to the darkened badge, and the green peaks of a pulse pounded on the display. Ratchet let out a gasp that was nearly a cry, and staggered as if ready to collapse. When he looked up again to convince himself that what he was seeing was, indeed, real, he was met by a painfully familiar soft smile.

"Optimus...?" he breathed.

"Hello, old friend," the Prime smiled.

He still didn't quite trust his own sight, nor his own hearing. He went forward in a daze. One hand reached out where it was met by another. That limb was too solid and too warm to be a hologram projection, and the glyphs – Miko could not recreate those. Affection. Regret. Grief. Happiness. All of that and more swirled together where the two palms met.

"It is you..." His voice cracked.

As tears formed, Optimus pulled him into a comforting embrace. The old healer nearly wept from joy and relief. Raf quietly slipped away to let the two have their little reunion in private.

"I suppose you desire a rational explanation?" his old friend asked him.

"No," he said, tears still in his optics but smiling nonetheless. "I'm not about to question a miracle."

Optimus pulled him into another embrace. He had never seen Ratchet this emotional, not since the day he had returned to Earth to tell the others the heart-breaking news. He had seen him that day, had happened upon him after his final deed. He had been so deeply broken from sorrow. He had wanted to stay, to comfort him, but the song emanating from the core had been too enrapturing to ignore. And the core, to his credit, had made a binding vow: he would watch over his friend for him while he slept. No harm would befall him, or his family. That had been enough to ease him into a dream void of war, void of suffering.

He had not known that Ratchet had been an emotional wreck for a week after his final disappearance, unable to do much more than huddle in a room and grieve. Rafael had been his one source of comfort during that awful week, always at his side, always trying to help. But seeing his friend crying and shaking in his arms, he could well imagine how emotionally shattered he had been. The old Prime was merely glad the tears that fell now were ones of joy, not pain.

"I missed you..." Ratchet whispered.

"As did I, old friend," he murmured back. "As did I."

Unbeknownst to the two, Charity had peeped out of the room to observe. Had they seen her, Optimus would have noticed her smile and recognized it: the same smile the One had made while lulling him to dream.

Jack idly noted heavy footfalls shaking the ground near him. He assumed Grimlock had come back for some more stuff to bring to Fix-It, and so kept reading through the report Fowler had written up. A prison ship randomly and mysterious falling out of orbit. Relkana. Corrupticons. Dark convictions. Now, a mysterious firewall. Why couldn't things ever be simple? Why couldn't it just be a crashed prison ship?

The thuds stopped. "Jackson?" a deep voice wondered in surprise.

"Oh, hey, Optimus," he greeted abstractedly.

After a second, the man jumped. The files in his hands dropped and the papers scattered all over the floor. "Optimus?!"

The smile that greeted him prompted one of his own. "I take it from your response that you did not see me arrive."

"Ah-heh, sorry. I was distracted. I-I thought you were Grimlock," he smiled meekly, massaging his neck awkwardly. "Um...hi. Nice to see you again."

"Are you busy? I will not interrupt if you are."

"Busy-ish, but you were always busy and you still made time for friends," he reminded him. "Seriously, honest question: how did you not go crazy as leader? Being the guy in charge is exhausting. Manage the troops, manage governmental relations, do the paperwork, keep up with combat training, participate in the field, ugh," Jack dragged his hands over his eyes. "It's so much."

"Jack, I keep telling you to take a break," huffed Ratchet. "You've accumulated weeks of paid vacation time and you haven't used a single day."

"It's kind of hard to find a good, safe spot to vacation when convicts are running all over the place, Ratchet," retorted Jack wryly. "If I go anywhere, chances are I'm going to get interrupted. Unless I vacation on the ISS or something."

Optimus didn't answer right away. Instead, he knelt and offered an open hand. Jack stepped onto it.

"I survived by taking days off," he smiled. "I suggest you do the same, Jackson, lest your mental health unravel. A leader is only as good as the stability of their mind."

Jack tilted his head. "Miko's friends in Tokyo did say that I could visit for a few days if I ever had the time. Since the team's going to be better equipped, I might as well see if that offer is still open."

Optimus nodded approval. "Where is Miko?"

Another groundbridge opened and a crocodile-looking 'bot was flung through to land on their belly. Their hands were tied behind backstrut by stasis cuffs. Judging by the shattered fangs in their mouth and the numerous, painful-looking super dents all over, they'd been pummeled by something big and powerful. And that "something" was a thirty-three-year old woman who walked through the groundbridge wearing the Apex Armor, now painted up with punk rock designs and splattered by wet moss and slime. The feet of the armor were stained by watery mud that she trekked in behind her, whereupon one such muddy foot was smashed down onto the crocodile-bot's head.

"HEY! Geroff!" the gator-bot snarled.

"One Rippersnapper, ready for a pod," the woman declared.

"Good work, Miko," applauded Jack. "...You didn't make a mess, did you?"

"You mean other than one she's bringing in with her?" Ratchet grumbled.

Miko laughed. "I was in the Everglades, Ratch. Y'know, a swamp? It was already a mess. A hot, wet, muggy mess full of mosquitos and big snakes. Ugh. One star review. Not a fan."

At the mention of snakes, Ratchet shuddered.

Miko saw Optimus then. Her already cheerful countenance lit up further.

"Cool! You guys summoned a ghost while I was gone?! Or, no, no, is that Raf messing with another projector again?"

"Nope. Not a ghost. Not a hologram. It's him. For real," Jack grinned.

"...You came back?" she realized softly. Then a full-blown bark of laughter escaped. "You came back! C'mere, you!"

Miko grabbed the big Prime and hugged though, though from the look on his face it might have been more of an anaconda death squeeze.

"Aw, I missed having your big baby face around," she laughed. "It's good to see you, Ops. I bet old Ratch is even happier!"

"That's putting it mildly," the old healer chuckled, wiping away a residual tear stain.

The two mechs shared a happy smile between them.

Okay, just to be clear: I'm not shipping these two as a romantic couple. Despite what rabid shippers on the internet think, it is possible for someone to love a friend deeply without it being romantic. That's what Optimus and Ratchet are. Really close friends who care deeply for each other. c: