A.N. is located at the end.
"What's wrong?"
Wheeljack glanced up from the tool he was fiddling with, then looked back down and continued what he had been doing.
"Nothing," he muttered softly.
Ratchet let out the robotic equivalent of a snort. "Nothing? 'Jack, you can't fool me. You're slouched down at the furthest, darkest table in the rec room and fiddling with something, yet you tell me nothing's wrong." Ratchet pulled out a chair, sat down and put his elbows on the table, supporting his chin on his intertwined fingers. "Now, what's going on?"
Wheeljack didn't look up. "Thinking."
"'Bout what?"
"The past...Charge..." Here the engineer looked up at his comrade. "You and me."
The medic wasn't surprised. "What about you and me?"
"What you said the other day." Wheeljack was still fiddling with the tool.
"Yes?"
"Did you mean it?" Wheeljack couldn't look at the other.
Ratchet reached across the table with one hand and gripped the Lancia's fidgeting ones. "Wheeljack," the other looked up, meeting Ratchet's blue optics with his own, "I meant every word. I – "
The CMO wasn't able to finish his statement as an alarm went off. "All Autobots report to the command center," Optimus' voice called over the P.A. system.
Jazz poked his head into the room. "C'mon, fellas, duty calls."
"Coming, Jazz," Wheeljack said as he got up with Ratchet.
"We'll talk later, okay?" Ratchet said.
"Yeah, sure," was the noncommittal response.
(Spacer text, sorry)
The battle wasn't going well. A call had come in from a local power plant saying that a small group of Decepticons were attacking. Prime had taken Jazz, Ironhide, Wheeljack, Ratchet, Sideswipe, Sunstreaker and Bluestreak to respond. As it turned out, the 'Cons outnumbered them two to one. Fortunately, they were able to take out Soundwave's cassettes as well as a pair of Constructicons, so they didn't have to deal with Devastator. However, Soundwave was jamming every long distance radio, so they had no way to call for backup.
Ratchet was growing more and more uneasy as the battle wore on. He suddenly realized what was making him fidget. "Where's Starscream?" he said into the Autobot radio frequency.
"Didn't he get shot down already?" Wheeljack sent back.
The scream of jet engines disproved him. The primarily white mech whirled around only to get at least twenty rounds of deadly fire right in the chest. The rounds did not fully pierce the Lancia's thick outer armor; however, the shards of glass from his now-shattered windshield cut more easily through his thin inner plating. The force of the shots knocked him off his feet and he arched through the air, coming down hard a dozen yards away. This jarring caused a particularly nasty piece of glass to dislodge from its already precarious position and cut through a main fuel line.
For Ratchet, time slowed down from the moment Starscream started his deadly pass to the moment Wheeljack hit the ground. He stood frozen for those moments, just watching. As soon as time resumed its natural speed, the medic screamed his friend's name. Without conscious thought he began pelting across the battlefield, somehow dodging fire and avoiding derbies. Without completely stopping, Ratchet fell to his knees next to his friend. Even at first glance he knew that Wheeljack would need a miracle the humans would call biblical in proportion. He began to remove as much of the now- useless chestplate as fast as he could without causing even more damage to the offline mech. He stared in growing horror at the increasing amount of fluid in Wheeljack's upper frames, cavities and crevasses.
He barely registered the arrival of Sunstreaker. The yellow warrior stood over him and his patient, providing cover for them. Ratchet fumbled to patch the severed line, but he knew it was close to impossible without any of the equipment that the med bay had.
"So much...he lost so much," he whispered to himself. Sunstreaker caught it and looked down for a moment, his optics brightening. Wheeljack's body was slowly graying – a sign that he was dying.
"Ratchet!" he exclaimed. "He's still dying! Do something!"
"I...I can't! I can't do anything else! He's not going to make it back to the Ark!"
"Then hold him!" Sunstreaker said intensely.
Ratchet was in the throes of what every medic tried to suppress, panic. "How?" he asked the one person who would probably not know anything useful.
"Save him."
Those words triggered an old memory of a rumor he had heard when the war first started. It said that a set of bond-mates had been sent into a battle, and one of the two was fatally injured. His mate had taken drastic action and had downloaded his partner's core programming into his own memory banks. They were able to repair the body, then reload the program back into the shell. But then again, the uploader was also a cassette host, and thus had a much larger amount of free memory than the normal Cybertronian.
"Slag that," he muttered to himself as he pried open a panel on the side of his helm and yanked out a cable. "I'm gonna save him even if it kills me." He ignored Sunstreaker's startled look as he did the same to Wheeljack. With a quick strong tug, his own cable snapped, followed by the cable from Wheeljack. He spliced the two cables together and was swamped with alerts and danger reports not his own. He shut off his optics, steeled himself, then allowed his consciousness to cross the cable link between himself and his friend.
Ratchet found himself in a world with no substance, direction and a quickly- dimming ambient light that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. He moved (floated, swam?) through the grayness of the place, looking for his goal.
"Wheeljack!" he called, though no sound came out of his vocalizer. He felt the response and continued on, hopefully in the direction of his friend's inner self. The light continued to dim, and Ratchet knew he had to find Wheeljack soon or they would both die, the medic trapped in the engineer's body.
His motion abruptly stopped as he seemed to slam into a wall. The wall became opaque and flickered with what Ratchet assumed was a memory. However, he wasn't prepared to witness this one.
[Memory]
"How's it going down there, 'Jack?"
"I don't know, Charge, I'm too busy keeping those Primus damned seeker- drones off your aft."
A burst of baritone laughter echoed back from the grey and yellow flyer as he swooped through a trio of drones. Bursts of yellow laser fire shot from his wing-mounted cannons, striking the Decepticons and downing all three. Wheeljack cheered on his bond-mate, then snapped off a few shots on another triad of drones, scattering them.
"Aw, slag," came the transmission from the squad leader.
"What's going on, chief?" questioned Charge.
"One eye is coming," came the grave reply.
Charge let out a curse in Old Autobot. "We have enough to deal with already!"
"Don't you think I know that?" the squad commander snarled back as he shot an advancing ground drone.
The squad's comm. officer was calling frantically to Iacon. "Squad 993 calling Iacon! Come in, Iacon! We have a situation! We need backup!"
Static was the only response he got. The red mech cursed and stared up at his commander. "We've lost this one, Deadlift. We gotta get outta here, as in now."
Deadlift snarled then barked the order to retreat to the tunnels under his command. The squad pulled back quickly trying to get to the tunnel entrances they had left a mile behind them. When they were in sight of the tunnel was when all hell broke loose. A huge purple figure landed heavily on the ground and was quickly surrounded by Seeker-drones. His single yellow optic bulb glowed menacingly as an equally-menacing glow started to emanate from the gun that was attached to his arm instead of a hand. The drones started to fire in volleys at the retreating Autobots, striking most of them down.
Wheeljack, Deadlift and the red comm. officer reached the relative safety of the tunnel entrance with moderate injuries. Deadlift looked back onto the battlefield where the last remnants of the squad were making a desperate dash to the tunnel. Charge flew towards the entrance, dodging fire from the multitude of Seekers. He was within twenty yards of his goal when a thick lance of purple energy shot through the deadly hail of light and seared through the grey flyer. Charge went down in a hail of metal and energon, his momentum causing him to bounce off the ground with a sickening crunch and through the tunnel entrance, which was slammed shut behind him. He crashed to a halt another twenty yards into the tunnel, which echoed with the horrible sounds of the impact. Wheeljack rushed to his side and stared in horror as his bond-mate tried to transform back to his robot mode. The flyer got stuck halfway and Wheeljack knelt down next to him, gathering the mangled and dying Charge into his arms. The engineer didn't want to believe it, but he knew it was true. Shockwave's shot had pierced through Charge completely, melting vital components and rupturing major fuel lines. The mostly white mech was quickly becoming stained with the fluids leaking from the other.
"Wheeljack." Charger's vocalizer squealed the word out as his systems started their final shutdown. "Promise," his vocalizer squealed again and he focused what little life he had left into his last words, "promise me you'll go on from here. Promise you'll keep living and find someone to take care of you when you blow yourself up with those projects." His optics continued to dim and his color faded. While the blast had destroyed much, it had also melted together enough components and tubes to draw out his death in an excruciating way. Distantly the pair heard the squad commander yelling at other survivors to get ready to fight in case Shockwave and his troops got through, but it was ignored in favor of their final moments together. "Promise me you'll find another."
"Charge," Wheeljack murmured, going emotionally numb.
Another squeal. "Promise me!"
"I promise, Charge, I promise."
And the grey flyer left life with a smile despite everything else. He got his promise.
[End Memory]
The wall shattered and Ratchet was hurled through thousands of other memories, which showed only in flashes. The end of the onslaught was his goal. He had found Wheeljack.
In this form the engineer was nothing but a steadily dimming ball of white, red, and green light, but the medic 'grabbed' at it with his very essence and using every ounce of stubbornness and will he had ever gained to drag them both back to his own mindscape. His strength was quickly being sapped by Wheeljack's dying body, however. Ratchet struggled through more memory tunnels and was surprised when a blue light appeared in front of him. Not knowing what it was, but desperate to save both himself and his friend, he latched onto it. It guided him through the other and back into his own body. Ratchet activated his optics, staring up into Sunstreaker's panicked face, and said, "I got him," before falling into a restoring stasis lock, Wheeljack's mind pulsing warmly in his own.
(Spacer text, please ignore)
Across the battlefield another mech also reactivated his optics, murmuring "Operation successful," in a melodic tone before joining his comrades in a 'strategic withdrawal.'
(Blahblahblah, please ignore this spacer)
"Hey, he's coming to."
"Good, 'cause Ahm gonna smack some sense inta him. Pullin' a stunt like that..."
"I believe that would not be the proper choice of action, my friend."
"Yeah, man, lay off. He performed a miracle."
Ratchet became aware of the sounds of Jazz, Ironhide and Wheeljack. This realization caused him to bolt upright from his original laid-out position.
"Wheeljack! You're alright! You're back in your body!"
The Lancia's optics conveyed the smile that the rest of his facial structure could not. "Yes. Perceptor and the new guy, First Aid, helped build me a new one. They were able to relocate my programming from your memory banks into the ones in here." He tapped his head above his distinctive 'flashing ear thingies,' as Bluestreak would say. Speaking of the gunner, Ratchet finally noticed the other 'Bots in the room. Bluestreak stood beaming next to the twins and Jazz. Prowl stood next to Ironhide, the tactician wearing a tiny smile compared to the wide grin of the elder warrior. Perceptor stood next to a mech Ratchet assumed to be First Aid, and there, standing behind Wheeljack, was another old friend, Optimus Prime.
"How long was I out?" the white medic asked his commander.
"Two Earth weeks. And we missed you every minute of them."
Another voice broke into the moment. "Me Swoop have a question."
The Dinobot stood up from his sitting position in the corner and walked to the med table where Ratchet sat. He looked into the newly-awakened mech's optics as if searching for something. "Does what happened to you Ratchet and him Wheeljack make you bond-mates now?"
The impact of the question was enormous, the intelligence and implications behind it crashing down upon those gathered in the med bay. The stillness held for a moment before Ratchet climbed off the med table and stood next to Wheeljack.
"Yeah, I think it does."
Bluestreak, Sideswipe and Jazz broke into cheers while everyone else gave the new mates gave pleased looks.
The medic and the engineer both had the same thought, but for one word:
'I did it, Deadbolt/Charge.'
FIN A.N.: WHEEE!!! It's finally done!!! YAY!!! :::Whacks fic with umbrella::: This thing took me long enough. Grr... Anyway, seems that Ratch and 'Jack get a happy enough ending. I hope you people have been paying attention, cuz a trio of reappearing characters here are going to have their own fic written for them. Thanks to all the reviews for the feedback, I'm gald you enjoyed my little story. And, before I forget, someone asked me what the '' in my first to chapters meant. It was SUPPOSED to be ... for internal radio, but FF.N messed it up... and on that note let me try that a different way. ... Just reverse the arrows
"What's wrong?"
Wheeljack glanced up from the tool he was fiddling with, then looked back down and continued what he had been doing.
"Nothing," he muttered softly.
Ratchet let out the robotic equivalent of a snort. "Nothing? 'Jack, you can't fool me. You're slouched down at the furthest, darkest table in the rec room and fiddling with something, yet you tell me nothing's wrong." Ratchet pulled out a chair, sat down and put his elbows on the table, supporting his chin on his intertwined fingers. "Now, what's going on?"
Wheeljack didn't look up. "Thinking."
"'Bout what?"
"The past...Charge..." Here the engineer looked up at his comrade. "You and me."
The medic wasn't surprised. "What about you and me?"
"What you said the other day." Wheeljack was still fiddling with the tool.
"Yes?"
"Did you mean it?" Wheeljack couldn't look at the other.
Ratchet reached across the table with one hand and gripped the Lancia's fidgeting ones. "Wheeljack," the other looked up, meeting Ratchet's blue optics with his own, "I meant every word. I – "
The CMO wasn't able to finish his statement as an alarm went off. "All Autobots report to the command center," Optimus' voice called over the P.A. system.
Jazz poked his head into the room. "C'mon, fellas, duty calls."
"Coming, Jazz," Wheeljack said as he got up with Ratchet.
"We'll talk later, okay?" Ratchet said.
"Yeah, sure," was the noncommittal response.
(Spacer text, sorry)
The battle wasn't going well. A call had come in from a local power plant saying that a small group of Decepticons were attacking. Prime had taken Jazz, Ironhide, Wheeljack, Ratchet, Sideswipe, Sunstreaker and Bluestreak to respond. As it turned out, the 'Cons outnumbered them two to one. Fortunately, they were able to take out Soundwave's cassettes as well as a pair of Constructicons, so they didn't have to deal with Devastator. However, Soundwave was jamming every long distance radio, so they had no way to call for backup.
Ratchet was growing more and more uneasy as the battle wore on. He suddenly realized what was making him fidget. "Where's Starscream?" he said into the Autobot radio frequency.
"Didn't he get shot down already?" Wheeljack sent back.
The scream of jet engines disproved him. The primarily white mech whirled around only to get at least twenty rounds of deadly fire right in the chest. The rounds did not fully pierce the Lancia's thick outer armor; however, the shards of glass from his now-shattered windshield cut more easily through his thin inner plating. The force of the shots knocked him off his feet and he arched through the air, coming down hard a dozen yards away. This jarring caused a particularly nasty piece of glass to dislodge from its already precarious position and cut through a main fuel line.
For Ratchet, time slowed down from the moment Starscream started his deadly pass to the moment Wheeljack hit the ground. He stood frozen for those moments, just watching. As soon as time resumed its natural speed, the medic screamed his friend's name. Without conscious thought he began pelting across the battlefield, somehow dodging fire and avoiding derbies. Without completely stopping, Ratchet fell to his knees next to his friend. Even at first glance he knew that Wheeljack would need a miracle the humans would call biblical in proportion. He began to remove as much of the now- useless chestplate as fast as he could without causing even more damage to the offline mech. He stared in growing horror at the increasing amount of fluid in Wheeljack's upper frames, cavities and crevasses.
He barely registered the arrival of Sunstreaker. The yellow warrior stood over him and his patient, providing cover for them. Ratchet fumbled to patch the severed line, but he knew it was close to impossible without any of the equipment that the med bay had.
"So much...he lost so much," he whispered to himself. Sunstreaker caught it and looked down for a moment, his optics brightening. Wheeljack's body was slowly graying – a sign that he was dying.
"Ratchet!" he exclaimed. "He's still dying! Do something!"
"I...I can't! I can't do anything else! He's not going to make it back to the Ark!"
"Then hold him!" Sunstreaker said intensely.
Ratchet was in the throes of what every medic tried to suppress, panic. "How?" he asked the one person who would probably not know anything useful.
"Save him."
Those words triggered an old memory of a rumor he had heard when the war first started. It said that a set of bond-mates had been sent into a battle, and one of the two was fatally injured. His mate had taken drastic action and had downloaded his partner's core programming into his own memory banks. They were able to repair the body, then reload the program back into the shell. But then again, the uploader was also a cassette host, and thus had a much larger amount of free memory than the normal Cybertronian.
"Slag that," he muttered to himself as he pried open a panel on the side of his helm and yanked out a cable. "I'm gonna save him even if it kills me." He ignored Sunstreaker's startled look as he did the same to Wheeljack. With a quick strong tug, his own cable snapped, followed by the cable from Wheeljack. He spliced the two cables together and was swamped with alerts and danger reports not his own. He shut off his optics, steeled himself, then allowed his consciousness to cross the cable link between himself and his friend.
Ratchet found himself in a world with no substance, direction and a quickly- dimming ambient light that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. He moved (floated, swam?) through the grayness of the place, looking for his goal.
"Wheeljack!" he called, though no sound came out of his vocalizer. He felt the response and continued on, hopefully in the direction of his friend's inner self. The light continued to dim, and Ratchet knew he had to find Wheeljack soon or they would both die, the medic trapped in the engineer's body.
His motion abruptly stopped as he seemed to slam into a wall. The wall became opaque and flickered with what Ratchet assumed was a memory. However, he wasn't prepared to witness this one.
[Memory]
"How's it going down there, 'Jack?"
"I don't know, Charge, I'm too busy keeping those Primus damned seeker- drones off your aft."
A burst of baritone laughter echoed back from the grey and yellow flyer as he swooped through a trio of drones. Bursts of yellow laser fire shot from his wing-mounted cannons, striking the Decepticons and downing all three. Wheeljack cheered on his bond-mate, then snapped off a few shots on another triad of drones, scattering them.
"Aw, slag," came the transmission from the squad leader.
"What's going on, chief?" questioned Charge.
"One eye is coming," came the grave reply.
Charge let out a curse in Old Autobot. "We have enough to deal with already!"
"Don't you think I know that?" the squad commander snarled back as he shot an advancing ground drone.
The squad's comm. officer was calling frantically to Iacon. "Squad 993 calling Iacon! Come in, Iacon! We have a situation! We need backup!"
Static was the only response he got. The red mech cursed and stared up at his commander. "We've lost this one, Deadlift. We gotta get outta here, as in now."
Deadlift snarled then barked the order to retreat to the tunnels under his command. The squad pulled back quickly trying to get to the tunnel entrances they had left a mile behind them. When they were in sight of the tunnel was when all hell broke loose. A huge purple figure landed heavily on the ground and was quickly surrounded by Seeker-drones. His single yellow optic bulb glowed menacingly as an equally-menacing glow started to emanate from the gun that was attached to his arm instead of a hand. The drones started to fire in volleys at the retreating Autobots, striking most of them down.
Wheeljack, Deadlift and the red comm. officer reached the relative safety of the tunnel entrance with moderate injuries. Deadlift looked back onto the battlefield where the last remnants of the squad were making a desperate dash to the tunnel. Charge flew towards the entrance, dodging fire from the multitude of Seekers. He was within twenty yards of his goal when a thick lance of purple energy shot through the deadly hail of light and seared through the grey flyer. Charge went down in a hail of metal and energon, his momentum causing him to bounce off the ground with a sickening crunch and through the tunnel entrance, which was slammed shut behind him. He crashed to a halt another twenty yards into the tunnel, which echoed with the horrible sounds of the impact. Wheeljack rushed to his side and stared in horror as his bond-mate tried to transform back to his robot mode. The flyer got stuck halfway and Wheeljack knelt down next to him, gathering the mangled and dying Charge into his arms. The engineer didn't want to believe it, but he knew it was true. Shockwave's shot had pierced through Charge completely, melting vital components and rupturing major fuel lines. The mostly white mech was quickly becoming stained with the fluids leaking from the other.
"Wheeljack." Charger's vocalizer squealed the word out as his systems started their final shutdown. "Promise," his vocalizer squealed again and he focused what little life he had left into his last words, "promise me you'll go on from here. Promise you'll keep living and find someone to take care of you when you blow yourself up with those projects." His optics continued to dim and his color faded. While the blast had destroyed much, it had also melted together enough components and tubes to draw out his death in an excruciating way. Distantly the pair heard the squad commander yelling at other survivors to get ready to fight in case Shockwave and his troops got through, but it was ignored in favor of their final moments together. "Promise me you'll find another."
"Charge," Wheeljack murmured, going emotionally numb.
Another squeal. "Promise me!"
"I promise, Charge, I promise."
And the grey flyer left life with a smile despite everything else. He got his promise.
[End Memory]
The wall shattered and Ratchet was hurled through thousands of other memories, which showed only in flashes. The end of the onslaught was his goal. He had found Wheeljack.
In this form the engineer was nothing but a steadily dimming ball of white, red, and green light, but the medic 'grabbed' at it with his very essence and using every ounce of stubbornness and will he had ever gained to drag them both back to his own mindscape. His strength was quickly being sapped by Wheeljack's dying body, however. Ratchet struggled through more memory tunnels and was surprised when a blue light appeared in front of him. Not knowing what it was, but desperate to save both himself and his friend, he latched onto it. It guided him through the other and back into his own body. Ratchet activated his optics, staring up into Sunstreaker's panicked face, and said, "I got him," before falling into a restoring stasis lock, Wheeljack's mind pulsing warmly in his own.
(Spacer text, please ignore)
Across the battlefield another mech also reactivated his optics, murmuring "Operation successful," in a melodic tone before joining his comrades in a 'strategic withdrawal.'
(Blahblahblah, please ignore this spacer)
"Hey, he's coming to."
"Good, 'cause Ahm gonna smack some sense inta him. Pullin' a stunt like that..."
"I believe that would not be the proper choice of action, my friend."
"Yeah, man, lay off. He performed a miracle."
Ratchet became aware of the sounds of Jazz, Ironhide and Wheeljack. This realization caused him to bolt upright from his original laid-out position.
"Wheeljack! You're alright! You're back in your body!"
The Lancia's optics conveyed the smile that the rest of his facial structure could not. "Yes. Perceptor and the new guy, First Aid, helped build me a new one. They were able to relocate my programming from your memory banks into the ones in here." He tapped his head above his distinctive 'flashing ear thingies,' as Bluestreak would say. Speaking of the gunner, Ratchet finally noticed the other 'Bots in the room. Bluestreak stood beaming next to the twins and Jazz. Prowl stood next to Ironhide, the tactician wearing a tiny smile compared to the wide grin of the elder warrior. Perceptor stood next to a mech Ratchet assumed to be First Aid, and there, standing behind Wheeljack, was another old friend, Optimus Prime.
"How long was I out?" the white medic asked his commander.
"Two Earth weeks. And we missed you every minute of them."
Another voice broke into the moment. "Me Swoop have a question."
The Dinobot stood up from his sitting position in the corner and walked to the med table where Ratchet sat. He looked into the newly-awakened mech's optics as if searching for something. "Does what happened to you Ratchet and him Wheeljack make you bond-mates now?"
The impact of the question was enormous, the intelligence and implications behind it crashing down upon those gathered in the med bay. The stillness held for a moment before Ratchet climbed off the med table and stood next to Wheeljack.
"Yeah, I think it does."
Bluestreak, Sideswipe and Jazz broke into cheers while everyone else gave the new mates gave pleased looks.
The medic and the engineer both had the same thought, but for one word:
'I did it, Deadbolt/Charge.'
FIN A.N.: WHEEE!!! It's finally done!!! YAY!!! :::Whacks fic with umbrella::: This thing took me long enough. Grr... Anyway, seems that Ratch and 'Jack get a happy enough ending. I hope you people have been paying attention, cuz a trio of reappearing characters here are going to have their own fic written for them. Thanks to all the reviews for the feedback, I'm gald you enjoyed my little story. And, before I forget, someone asked me what the '' in my first to chapters meant. It was SUPPOSED to be ... for internal radio, but FF.N messed it up... and on that note let me try that a different way. ... Just reverse the arrows