Ratchet's gaze kept flicking back and forth as he wandered into the darkened ruins of the abandoned lab, countless remnants of past failed projects littering the cracked floor. He hated this place and he wouldn't have dared step foot into the former Decepticon lair under normal circumstances, yet this situation demanded nothing less of him.

This was the only lead he had, and desperation was a strong motivator.

He stepped neatly around the debris, swords at the ready in case anything so much as twitched. Nothing had so far, but that did little to appease his anxiety.

"You're paranoid," Smokescreen had jokingly told him once.

"When you've seen as much as I have, you'll find that having extra caution keeps you alive," the medic retorted without looking up from his work.

He hadn't been completely sure in that claim at the time, it was just something to give the rookie to think about. Yet now those words rang quite true.

A sharp clatter up ahead drew the mech's focus and he raised his weapons. In the inadequate light, he saw two blue optics shining out from the dark. Stepping out with her hands raised, Arcee spoke calmly. "Easy Ratchet, it's just me."

He lowered his blades with a shuddering vent. "My apologies."

"It's fine, I don't like being here either," she relaxed her posture, though she still kept scanning the room for possible threats. "I found a working terminal up ahead, think you can get through the 'Cons' old security protocols?"

'Do I have a choice?' He thought bitterly. "I should be able to. Hopefully Shockwave's notes can be of some use."

The two-wheeler nodded in agreement, her mouth a hard line set with determination. The medic knew she was counting on him, it's why she came all the way from Cybertron.

There had been no response after he'd explained everything, only a claustrophobic silence that stretched too long for both sides' liking. The medic gripped the sides of the console, leaning on it to help remain upright as he awaited any reaction from the those on the other side of the comm line. He'd sent the images and scans, the data he had found, along with what the normal bio-signatures of the humans had looked like in the past. Anyone with a working processor would understand the rapid decline of the boy's health, and how much damage was already done.

They were just as stunned about the problem as he was, if not more.

::I'm coming to Earth.:: Arcee's voice was cold with familiar anger. ::If Jack's in danger then I have to help.::

::But, what can we do?:: Smokescreen sounded hurt. ::It's not li-::

::There has to be something!:: She snapped over the line.

::Enough!:: Ultra Magnus halted the shouting before it could escalate.

There was another brief pause, then Bumblebee finally chimed in. ::Didn't Shockwave experiment on organic life?::

::Bee!:: Bulkhead began to reprimand the scout.

::No, that's not what I was getting at! I mean, do you think we could find one of his labs? Maybe he found something that could help.::

::It's possible.:: Ratchet admitted. ::But I don't know of any such location. .::

::Well, we might know someone who does.:: Wheeljack's smirk was audible in his tone.

The old 'bot stayed on the comm line as few of the others went to interrogate Knockout. Arcee had been granted permission to leave and accompany the medic as backup, so she departed to prepare. The remaining voices dwindled away slowly, and for a third time that evening, the call was silent.

::Are you okay, old friend?:: Optimus said gravely.

::I should have been here to prevent this.:: The medic dared glance at the images of the boy's deterioration he had on display of the console. ::This is all my fault.::

::No, I fear the fault is my own.:: The Prime rumbled low. ::Had I not chosen him to go to Vector Sigma, this would not have occurred at all.::

::Optimus, you and I both know that he would have volunteered to go even if you hadn't chosen him. Without the journey, we may have lost you for good.::

The Prime only hummed in response, and his friend knew he wasn't content with the answer.

It wasn't long before the coordinates for a possible location was retrieved and entered into the system. Ratchet took to the road as quickly as he could, meeting up with Arcee at the site.

The computer was the only thing lighting up the room when the pair of bots entered, its dull purple glow wavering slightly every few seconds. The white and red mech walked over to the terminal while the blue femme stood guard for any hint of danger. He went to work instantly, decrypting files, opening work logs and study reports, searching for anything that could be helpful and downloading what he could salvage.

There were tons of folders on energon-induced organic decay and how Cybertronian radiation could poison organic life in moderate doses, all of which included images, videos, or diagrams of the process. The Decepticon scientist was thorough and had thousands of documented trials.

It all made Ratchet sick. Worse still was that he'd have to look through it all in closer detail once it was copied.

'Primus, how could someone do this?'

He'd known of a few who'd done unethical trials before, but far from anything like this. This was systematic, tortuous, and from what he could tell at a cursory glance, it all ended in death.

That didn't bode well for Jack.

"Any luck?" Arcee's question pulled the mech from his thought spiral.

"There's such a wealth of research here it'll take days to go through all of it thoroughly," he huffed. "Not that much of it inspires hope at this moment."

"Wouldn't expect it to," she snarked. "But there has to be something we can use."

"Primus help us if there isn't."

The pair waited in silence as the download finished, both trying to ignore the bleak outcomes that might surface. This needed to work. If the research couldn't lead them to a cure or other solution, then their friend was going to die. Neither wanted another tally to be added to the death toll.

As soon as the task was completed, they left the lab and raced back out into the open plains to hail for a groundbridge.

The rippling portal tore into the air not a moment later, allowing the bots passage back to the government-issued hangar. Fowler was at the console, and shut the gateway when both bots were safely inside.

"I'd hoped that next time I saw you, it'd be under better circumstances," the man addressed them with a weathered smile. He'd been briefed on their mission, and had come as quickly as he could. If the bags under his eyes were any indication, he'd woken up in the middle of the night to come help them.

"At least the entire world's not ending," Arcee retorted in kind.

'Still kind of feels like it though.' The thought came unbidden to the Ratchet's processor. Even after all these vorns of countless combats and rescues, the idea of another loss still scared him. Especially when it came to children. 'Get a hold of yourself, you haven't lost yet! You still have time!' Doubt still rattled around in his tanks.

As the official and two-wheeler shared a terse conversation, the mech set himself to work. It was going to be a long day.

Jack was roused from sleep by the sound of something clattering to the floor. His head snapped up, glancing around the living room before finding the culprit: the TV remote. He stared at it blankly as his brain caught up with him.

He fell asleep on the couch. Again.

'This sucks. I can't fall asleep when I'm supposed to, and now I can't stay awake.' Nothing seemed to be going right lately.

He pushed himself up from his resting place with a soft groan and made his way to the kitchen. He didn't feel hungry, but maybe eating something would at least give him enough energy to remain awake until his mom got home.

'Mom.' Oh frag, he hadn't told her yet. How could he? 'Hey mom, I'm dying because apparently I've got a weird alien heart that's been killing me slowly from the inside.' He'd barely had the heart to tell her when he'd gotten bad grades in middle school, but something like this? She'd lose it, and Jack couldn't bear the thought of putting her through that kind of stress! The past few months had been so hard enough on them both.

He'd all but dropped out of his engineering degree because he couldn't make it to class; he'd been put on academic probation due to absences from his worsening condition. While the students and faculty had all been sympathetic, the administration hadn't been as kind. He'd asked if there were ways he could make up the classes online, but as most of the work was practical and meant to be done in the class under the supervision of the instructors, there was little he could do. Even with all of his scholarships, the financial blow was still massive.

After being sent home, he'd resigned himself to helping around the house as much as possible. He wasn't able to stand as long as needed for a shift at his old job, and they didn't want someone with a mysterious illness serving food.

June'd started taking on extra shifts, doing whatever she could to help them both get by. He hated seeing her so worn down by everything, so he took care of the house for her. That way his mom didn't have to worry about coming home to any sort of mess. It was the least he could do, yet some days, it was all he could manage before exhaustion set in. To think that a few years ago he could go entire days on strenuous missions and outrun giant aliens, but now he was lucky if he could vacuum the first floor of his house in an afternoon.

'This is pathetic.' He scolded himself mentally as he poured a bowl of cereal and sat down at the table with a defeated sigh. It was a bland, 'healthy' brand, but it was also the only thing he'd been able to keep down recently. He slowly picked away at the bowl's contents when the sound of an engine caught his attention.

It came from the garage.

Jack glanced at the clock. Even with an early shift, his mom wasn't due home for a few hours.

A familiar voice called out his name.

The boy abandoned his bowl and rushed to the garage, ignoring the sudden pain that flared in his chest. He threw the door open, nearly tripping in his rush to greet the sudden visitor.

"Arcee!"

"Good to see you too," she was in vehicle mode, parked in the middle of the small space. 'Sadie' was perched atop her back, facing towards him. Even though she didn't have eyes in this form, he could feel her staring at him.

"You look-"

"Like shit?" He offered. "It's, uh, it's been rough."

"Well," the holoform dissipated. "Feel good enough to go for a ride and catch up? Don't worry, we can go slow," the 'bot assured.

For what felt like the first time in a long while, he smiled. "Yeah, that sounds fun."

As Ratchet combed through the files, he was left with more questions than when he originally started searching. His optics were narrowed at the display screen in the hangar. It blankly kept projecting the information, no changes appeared.

It was infuriating.

"None of the symptoms match." He ground his denta together.

In most cases where Shockwave had exposed animals or people to the effects of energon, the results were far more extreme. As when Raf had been infected by dark energon, the degeneration of organic tissue was nearly instantaneous. Human nervous systems began breaking down quickly, unable to cope with the sheer intensity of the energy that invaded them. Nerve endings and transmitters were fried, seizures and convulsions were common. It looked like they were being disintegrated. Most subjects never made it past a week.

Those subjected to radiation exposure didn't fare much better, often having their bodies start failing in a few days. Lesions and profuse bleeding occured as their forms were poisoned by the foreign energy. Their bodies simply could not hold themselves together after a while.

Jack had a Spark; a concentrated mass of energy had been housed in his chest for over two years. His nervous system was functional. He was unhealthy, but compared to what the Decepticon test subjects went through, he was in much better condition. His systems were stressed, weakened, and struggling, but he was still there. He was still alive.

If the medic had followed Shockwave's research to its natural conclusion, the boy should have been dead years ago. Primus, he should have displayed any symptoms within a few days after visiting Vector Sigma!

"What is going on?" The medic kept comparing the files over and over, but nothing seemed to yield any results. The boy's condition was as if he had a different ailment entirely. That shouldn't be the case, and yet the data argued otherwise. 'He's not acting like he's been poisoned,' he noted as he brought up another subject's file: one who suffered radiation similar to that of a Cybertronian Spark. They'd lasted three days.

He flicked his optics back to the readings of the alien heart residing in the boy's body. 'It's healthy, but the rest of him is acting almost like he's been starved.'

He took a few steps back from the console, bringing a servo up to his helm in frustration.

The affliction wasn't making sense! There was no resemblance to the issues those humans had under Shockwave's ministrations. 'It's almost like a protoform rejecting a Spark.' The mech vaguely recalled a few cases he'd studied before the war. Sometimes Sparks were too strong for the fragile frames to contain, and it'd destroy them from the-

'Wait.' He turned off the data from Shockwave's lab, instead searching from something in his own archive: old records of a dying Sparkling, one of the few he could not save in his earlier tenure as a physician.

It matched. "By the Allspark! How did I not see it?"

Ratchet turned off all the human readings of Jack's files, only leaving up the diagnostics of the Cybertronian elements. It was a textbook case of protoform burnout. He'd been so focused on the aspect of Jack's biology that he mistook the problem for what it was! His Spark was trying to synchronize and integrate into a protoform that was not there; it was in a container far too weak to hold or provide for it. It was unsustainable, no wonder the boy looked so drained!

Whenever this had happened on Cybertron, there were two possible outcomes; either the Spark would burn itself out, destroying its shell along with it, or it could be stabilized. The latter was much more difficult, as what helped stabilize the collapsing Spark varied from case to case. Sometimes the protoform needed to be reinforced, other instances required energon transference.

But this wasn't like any of those seen before. Jack was dying because he was human, and it was a miracle he wasn't dead from the radiation already. Removing the Spark would kill him. Leaving it there would do no better.

The mech was back to square one.

'Pits. If he were Cybertronian there'd be a way, but this? There is nothing I can do to save a human with a Spark.' Ratchet didn't know what to make of this, nor did he suspect anyone else on Cybertron would either. He'd made an effort to learn human medicine years ago, and they had no way to comprehend something as severe as this.

There were no solutions.

It was almost as if he was trying to fix an act of Primus himself.

The sentiment struck him. 'What if-'

An alert from the comm link sounded, and the medic shook away his frayed thoughts. Maybe Smokescreen was right, maybe he was paranoid. There was just no way-

::Go for Ratchet.::

::Old friend.:: The Prime's voice was thick with guilt. ::I have come upon a disquieting revelation.::

The mech felt the energon in his veins freeze.

The desert air felt pleasant as the pair raced along the barren road. Although it wasn't nearly as fast as they'd once gone, it was still an exhilarating ride out in the open country. The warm sun and brisk breeze was a welcomed change from the stagnant air of the house, and Arcee's company only made the excursion better. It was nice.

"I've missed this so much," he laughed. It stung a little to do so, but he felt too good to care.

"Me too," the scout agreed as she pulled off road, next to one of the mesas dotting the horizon.

Jack got off as she came to a stop and she transformed, standing beside him as the sun started to dip lower in the sky.

"Forgot how beautiful this place is," she smiled softly.

"Don't you have sunsets on Cybertron?"

"They're different," she rolled her optics, but grimaced a bit when they came to rest on him.

He pretended not to feel hurt.

"So how is it back home? Everything going smoothly? No 'Cons?"

"It's about as smooth a transition as we can get," there was an underlying note of bitterness. "A lot of the refugees are scared, no matter what side they were on. We're all trying to rebuild, but it's hard to trust some of them. Some wounds take a long time to heal."

"Ah," he nodded. He should have guessed it'd be hard to put aside all the tension between the formerly warring factions. After all, he supposed he couldn't totally trust anyone if he'd known they shot at his friends earlier.

'Live and let live' didn't always work.

"I hope it gets better, you guys deserve to happy after all you've done."

"We all do," she knelt down, leveling her gaze at him.

'Frag.' He knew that tone in her voice well.

"We're all worried about you. Why didn't you tell us sooner?"

"I didn't know what it was," he stared at the ground. "I wasn't sure what was going on, and besides, I can't bug you over every little thing that goes wrong in my life, Arcee."

She vented a soft sigh, turning back to watch the setting sun.

They spent the next few minutes in a soothing silence, watching the colors spill over the red rocks and plains until the sky was filled with blooms of purple and blue. As the first few stars started twinkling in the sky, Jack broke the peace. "I should probably be getting back home, mom's going to be back soon."

The femme hummed in assent, switching back into her alt mode. In a practiced motion, he got on her back, and they made their way onto the road.

As they wound their way back through the plains, the boy began to feel hot under his helmet. He tried ignoring it at first, but his vision started to blur. He couldn't breathe. Was he breathing? Why was he so hot? He tried to speak. He coughed. He was too warm.

His grip on the handlebars slackened slightly, and he thought he heard Arcee speak but he couldn't make out what she was saying.

His chest hurt.

He let go.

He fell.

She screamed.