To CreativeMultitasker and Iceinherheart: Hopefully, this doesn't come across as creepy and desperate, but if you're reading this, thank you. A million times, thank you! Your reviews and support mean so much to me, but I never know how to respond. This fandom has been fairly ruthless when it comes to feedback, and I always wonder what I'm doing wrong or not doing right. Then one of you will post a review or favorite a story, and that reassures me it's not a wasted effort. If you think it's okay, odds are good there are others out there that like it too and just don't say so.
Most sincerely,
IB
Working Title: Dreambridge
Rating: T
Pairing: Arcee/Ratchet
Summary: When a modification to the groundbridge goes wrong, Ratchet thinks Arcee is haunting his processor for killing her. But, the Arcee in his dreams and thoughts seems convincingly adamant that she's not offline.
Notes: I was going to put Arcee at the mercy of Ratchet's dreams and thoughts. Some funny, some nightmares, some delving into the medic's past more deeply than he'd care for.
"I dunno, Ratchet. Hooking something like that up to your brain … seems pretty risky," Miko said doubtfully.
Ratchet continued to arrange the fine wires in a neat fan by color, ignoring the assembly of humans watching him.
"It is a straight-forward process," he assured, though he really didn't know why he felt the need to explain himself or justify anything. "It's no more invasive than setting up a holoform drive, and there isn't a direct tie-in to my neural net. Perfectly safe, in other words."
"Is it bothering anyone else here that Miko is being the voice of reason, and Ratchet is doing something crazy?" Raf asked. Beside him, Jack and Fowler – then, even Miko raised their hands.
"It's NOT crazy," the medic insisted firmly. "I know what I'm doing."
He cast a scowl at everyone around his workbench then turned his back to Raf and pried up the back of his helm, revealing the mesh of delicate components.
"Now," he said with finality. "All I need you to do is connect the wires to my auxiliary conduit in the correct order."
Raf swallowed.
"Alright, but …"
"Just do it! This isn't open-case spark surgery." He winced feeling something sharp splice the casing a little too clumsily. "But, don't attack it either!"
If he'd had his druthers, Wheeljack or Optimus would've been the one to do this. But, he'd had to settle for Raf since everyone else was out on an energon run.
"What if he slips, and Team Prime's medic becomes a robo-vegetable?" Miko asked.
He felt Raf hesitate, and his energon tanks churned.
"Could you not distract him so much?" he requested. He wouldn't deny he was nervous enough as it was.
"I still don't understand why you need it," Fowler said.
"Yeah." Jack nodded. "The team's done just fine with you manning the groudbridge."
"The point is, I shouldn't have to man it. Soundwave has a similar modification for operating the Decepticon groundbridges without being confined to it's console, and it's given them the advantage on several occasions." Ratchet explained. Again. "We've been fortunate that I've always been available to operate it. But, what if I'm not? What if I have to fight, or I'm in a life-or-death operation?"
"That's why you taught Raf," Miko pointed out. "Right?"
Ratchet vented a sigh. "If this prototype works, we'll all have the ability to summon a groundbridge to our exact coordinates with no middleman and in a fraction of the time it would take to comm me and for me to put in the coordinates and open the bridge from the base. And, anyone at base will be able to send a groundbridge to any coordinates or to anyone with a tracking signal in case they need backup."
"I hope it works after all the time and effort you've put into it," Raf said. He shut the back of the medic's helm. "How's that feel?"
The medic rolled his shoulders and turned his helm to the sides a few times.
"A little uncomfortable," he grumbled, wincing slightly at the prickling sensation. "But, I'll fix it on the final model."
He straightened, facing the back wall behind the console.
"Alright," he said confidently. "First test."
The four humans looked on from the rail. Several awkward seconds passed before the three kids looked at Fowler doubtfully. He shrugged. It wasn't that he didn't share their doubt, but the old bot had surprised him time after time. Hell, building a groundbridge out of a bunch of mothballed Commodore computers was nothing short of miraculous.
"Hmm." Ratchet's optics focused past his HUD and on the wall again. "Maybe, if I reroute the command directly through my memory core …"
Pain seared through his processor, and it felt like his helm lit up like a lantern. But, then there was a bright flare of light and a deafening bang like a stun grenade and the bridge swirled to life into the wall.
"Ratchet?" Raf looked worried.
He groaned, cautiously cracking an optic to look at the groundbridge.
"Oh … frag …" he swore. "I'm alright."
"You don't look alright," Jack stated.
He steadied himself against his workbench, opening up his self-diagnostic menu on his gauntlet. There wasn't any physical damage at least, and everything seemed to be functioning normally.
"What happened?"
He met Raf's concerned look.
"It's … fine. Some data went the wrong way on a one-way connection, I think." He shook his helm to clear his vision, but it didn't really help. "I'll have to fix that."
"So, does the groundbridge work?" Miko asked.
"Why wouldn't it? I didn't reprogram anything on the bridge itself."
To prove his point, he strode through it to the site of the old base, but his helm felt like it might explode. Quickly, he went back through.
"Take it out!" he snapped, frustrated at himself. "It's back to the drawing board."
Raf nodded eagerly, but before the medic could sit back down for him, a chime indicated an incoming commlink.
"Ratchet." Optimus' voice sounded pressured, and they could hear the sound of phaser fire. "Requesting an immediate groundbridge to my coordinates."
"Doc, we're gonna need a bridge!" Wheeljack interrupted urgently. "We've got 'Cons on our tail, and we're running out of road down here."
"I'm sending one to Optimus first," the medic announced over both frequencies, quickly turning to the console. "Send me your coordinates in twenty seconds, Wheeljack."
His original bridge winked out and was replaced with another. Optimus, Bumblebee, and Smokescreen drove through at full speed, just barely able to stop before hitting the observation deck. All three took a moment to collect themselves and let their coolant run before transforming.
"Maybe you should work on building a second groundbridge instead of a fancy remote control," Miko suggested.
He shut down the bridge again and typed in Wheeljack's coordinates next. Ultra Magnus, Bulkhead, and finally Wheeljack tore through in an even bigger rush than the first team.
"Shut it down!" he ordered, transforming up into his bipedal form. "I left a little going-away present for the 'Cons," he said with a smirk.
Ratchet looked up from his monitor and felt his engine seize for an instant. "No WAIT!" he shouted, but it was too late. His sensors indicated an explosion of energy was coming through, and he forced it to shut down before it erupted into the hangar.
For a full second, everyone was silent. Then, the only other person paying attention besides Ratchet spoke up.
"Where's Arcee?" Jack asked uneasily.
The wrecker's brow rose, and he looked back at the wall, then to Optimus' team, then to his.
"WHERE'S ARCEE?!" the boy demanded.
"She was with you," Wheeljack said, looking to Optimus.
"She was coming to meet you after you called for backup!" Smokescreen said, defending Optimus.
Ultra Magnus stepped in. "Arcee did not report this to me. She must have went against protocol."
"You think?!" Wheeljack snapped. "I'll tell you what you can do with your protocol …"
"ENOUGH!" Ratchet snarled, making everyone jump. With their full attention, he brought up her life signal on the monitor. "She's online."
"Open a bridge," Wheeljack demanded. "I'm going back for her."
"You will do no such thing. That explosion has collapsed the cavern by now. You'll be phased into solid rock," Magnus protested.
"He just said she was alive!"
"I can go get the phase shifter," Smokescreen said, bolting for the storage vault.
"No time," Ratchet said. Her signal was weakening, and without her conscious, the groundbridge couldn't get a lock on her coordinates below ground. "I'll get her."
Without hesitating, he brought up the scout's signal on his GPS and routed it through his memory core like before. The pain was searing and instantaneous, same as the first time, but he ignored it and the groundbridge opened with a flash and a loud bang. He braced himself for more pain when he rushed through, but it didn't help. It nearly brought him to his knees.
But, he was in the cavern now, in a dark pocket of air. All around him, Ratchet could hear the rock cooling from the explosion and pebbles raining down on his armor as it settled. There wasn't much time. Where was she? The remote was supposed to make a bridge at her exact location. He turned on his headlights and swept them through the dust.
Several troopers lay crushed or in pieces, their armor charred black or still glowing a dull red from the heat. It made his tanks churn with dread.
"Arcee?" he called. There wasn't much of an echo. His voice sounded muffled even.
A huge part of the ceiling collapsed behind him, cutting him off from the groundbridge and nearly burring him alive.
"Primus," he hissed.
It didn't matter. He could summon one and go back the same way he'd come. No need to start getting claustrophobic. Arcee needed him.
He heard a soft moan, and swept the darkness with his lights again. A pile of rocks shifted, and he fell to his knees, throwing the stones and boulders aside frantically.
The rock above him cracked and groaned a warning.
He uncovered a scratched and dented gauntlet with the hint of a pink highlight beneath the char.
"Arcee!" He got his servos around her and pulled her free of the rubble.
The femme groaned, trying to sit up and get her bearings, but he stopped her from moving.
"Stay still," he ordered gently, kneeling beside her.
The heat had blackened her armor, and he could smell burnt coolant and lubricant from ruptured lines. The concussion in the confined space might have disabled her gyroscope as well.
"I'm here."
Arcee groped for him, trying to focus her optics to no avail.
"Ratchet …"
He took her servo, and she jumped, making his spark ache. "It's going to be alright," he promised.
The cracking sound intensified above him. The air pocket was collapsing.
He carefully scooped her still-smoking body up, and used his remote to summon a new bridge back to base. Like before, it didn't open up right where he'd needed it. Already the idea had proven a worth-while investment of his time and discomfort a thousand times over. Maybe he could recalibrate it.
"Stay alert, Arcee." But, he didn't need to say it. The femme knew the drill by now.
"I'm fine." She managed a smile, knowing she was lying through her dente, and knowing he knew that.
He relaxed a little. She'd be alright.
The pain swept through his sensors again, even more painful than before. His processor throbbed as he stepped through the groundbridge and back into the Autobot base.
"Arcee?! Is she okay?" Jack shouted, practically leaping down the stairs.
The rest of the team looked shaken.
"She'll be fine," he insisted quickly, carrying her past the rest of the 'Bots to his med bay.
"Maybe I didn't hear her comm me," Magnus mused, already beating himself up.
Optimus' face hardened, but he looked away from his SIC to meet Ratchet's optic. Bulkhead and Wheeljack shared an uneasy glance.
"I should've …" Wheeljack tried to begin. "If I hadn't …"
Bumblebee chirped and whirred and Smokescreen's doorwings rose hopefully with the black and yellow scout's.
"Yeah. The Doc's fixed lots worse. She's gonna be good as new in a few days, right?"
Ratchet had laid her down on the medical berth and didn't answer, already immersed in his work and the world where just himself and his patient existed.
"Can you feel this?" he asked, dragging his fingers up a blackened plate on her arm. "Arcee?"
Her optics were offline, and the joints in her arm felt limp.
"Arcee."
He patted the side of her helm.
"She was just awake," he said to himself. "Arcee!"
Her optics weren't even shuttered – just dark.
The base held their collective ventilations as he did a full scan of the femme with genuine panic in his optics. The results his diagnostic panel gave him weren't the answer he wanted.
"Is she …" Smokescreen began to ask, but Bumblebee hit him upside the back of his helm hard and gave an angry hiss of static.
"Ratchet …" Optimus spoke up, but the medic didn't look away from hastily opening her plating.
Finally, unable to take the tension any longer, Wheeljack shouldered his way past the rest of the team and watched as Ratchet looked around his suddenly new and vastly unfamiliar medical bay. He grabbed the crash cart and wheeled it into the medic's reach, and instinct took over again in a flash.
"Tell me what to do," he ordered. Ratchet glanced up, meeting his optics with impatience for an instant, and he fought back the impulse to grab the closest blunt, heavy object and hammer one of his Pit-damned grenades under Wheeljack's pelvic plating.
"Replace the main energon line in her shoulder assembly," he finally managed to say levelly as he set the charge on his spark defibrillator.
"Right."
The femme's body jumped with the shock of the paddles. Her spark glowed faintly. The timer had started.
His servos went to work, retiming her engine as his assistant worked on her ruptured line. The engine would have to be restarted before her spark went out again. The spark regulated the engine. The engine powered the spark. But, getting it all synced together wouldn't do her any good if she bled out the rest of her energon through the main line.
"I can fix an engine," Wheeljack insisted, moving Ratchet's servos aside. "You do the medic thing." He gestured back to her spark chamber.
Ratchet didn't argue. He grabbed up a cylinder of nitromethane from the cart. The wrecker's brow rose when he filled a syringe with enough to shock-start three mechs his size. Ratchet met his optics for an instant then pressed it into the fuel line between her engine and spark chamber, holding his ventilations.
Power systems got exponentially resistant to the treatment every time it was used. And, the more that was injected into her fuel, the greater the risk it would blow her engine. Even if he hadn't been forced to use the terrible grade of the Earth-made equivalent, Arcee had been revived more times than she could remember before she'd even met a medic that knew his aft from the business end of a phaser rifle.
"Got it," Wheeljack announced.
Ratchet dialed up the charge on the defibrillator, and placed one servo on the syringe and one on the paddles' console.
"Four steps," Ratchet stated. "Together on the first."
He could feel Jack's eyes on him and could sense him willing his friend and partner back as hard as the current building up in the paddles.
"One."
Wheeljack torqued a timing gear, pulling energon into her engine at the same time as Ratchet releasing the first charge into her spark. Naturally, her engine spluttered to life with the jolt for a few cycles.
"Two."
He injected half of the nitromethane, Arcee's chassis went rigid and her engine whined to dangerous RPMs, but her spark began to dim once more.
"Three."
Ratchet shocked her spark again, and shot the rest of the stimulant into her.
"Four."
As her spark brightened again and her engine sped up even more, the two synced up again. The glow of her spark corresponding with the speed of her engine, each driving the other.
For a moment, he felt relief. But, then a monitor began flashing a warning, and her spark began to dim again. Her engine began to slow.
No. That should have worked. Engine and spark should have continued their cycle on their own.
"Doc, what do we do?"
Her optics remained offline, and her body lax. Ratchet scanned her. Maybe the damage was too much for her to come back online. Maybe her programing was corrupted. There wasn't time to check.
He grabbed cables to a backup power supply and clamped them to her backup conduit. Her engine hiccuped a sputter then evened out. But, her spark was still going out. It wouldn't accept a direct power source. After an instant of panic, he turned and tore his test engine off his workbench. He swept a place clear on the table beside her and hooked the surrogate engine up to her spark chamber.
For what felt like an eternity, he watched her spark and engine struggle to accept their alternatives.
"Is she alright?" Jack finally asked.
Then, by an act of Primus, everything worked.
"Ratchet?"
"She's stable," he chose to announce, letting Jack assume that was good news. "I … have my work cut out for me."
He looked around him at the other members of his team, then returned his full attention to the femme on his table. Even Optimus couldn't read the unease in his medical officer's faceplate.
"See, I knew Ratchet had it under control," Smokescreen assured Bumblebee.
"We will leave you to your work then, Old Friend," Optimus stated – an order for everyone to clear out.
Only Wheeljack paused to look at him. He almost wished that the wrecker was as blissfully ignorant as the others.
"You should take Jack home," Ratchet suggested.
"Smokescreen's gonna do it," he dismissed.
"Smokescreen didn't blow up his friend and partner." Wheeljack scowled, a snide and defensive comment on the tip of his glossa. "Do it! It's too late in the game to have bad energon between allies."
They glared at each other in a standoff for tense moment before Wheeljack finally vented a collective sigh, ground his dente, and turned his back on the medic without a word.
When the base was empty, Ratchet felt his knees weaken and a wave of nausea wash over him. He looked back at the charred femme's chassis and the makeshift life support she was tangled up in.
There was only one thing that could be wrong. Only one thing regulated the sync between the spark and engine, but he didn't want to confirm it. She'd been fine, then she wasn't. How was that possible? He'd never seen someone's CPU fail instantly while they were alert and aware – at least not without an outside factor.
The medic stepped back to the medical berth and pressed his fingers to the nodes beneath her jaw, accessing her operating system.
Nothing.
He shuttered his optics in a grimace of pain.
"Arcee …"
He worked. It was all he could do. No one came into his medical bay for fear of the mech 'ripping them a new one' as Miko put it. No one saw. No one knew.
He was only dimly aware of the passage of time. It all blurred together in a haze, and he realized at some point that he'd subconsciously put himself into full battle mode. It had been vorns since the last time – on a battlefield of dead and dying soldiers, unable to recharge, unable to refuel. He and his underlings could go ten decacycles on a full tank with only their processors and the rudimentary functions to perform their tasks.
But, he hadn't refueled recently. How long had he been holed up? Weeks? A month? Longer? It didn't matter if he could fix her.
All he'd had to do was fix her.
The femme was clean now. Her armor mended. Burnt lines replaced. New wires routed. She looked like she was recharging – like she could wake up any minute.
But … something was still not right. Why wouldn't she online her optics as suddenly and as without reason as when they'd gone out.
He opened her chest again and studied the pale amethyst light in the bottom of her chamber. It pulsed weakly by steady. His legs felt stiff and tired, so he sat as he retraced lines for the thousandth time. But, nothing was out of place.
He picked up her fingers and studied them draped over his single digit and slumped. She'd been so strong, but he'd failed. Now, she was this weak, frail, shell. Just a prison for the once-vibrant spark inside.
He keened, low in his chest and squeezed her servo, letting his grief go and bringing systems back online so he could allow himself the luxury of mourning through his energy field.
"I'm sorry."
She'd been kept long enough. There was no Allspark to call her back home, but somewhere out in the frontier of space, a femme on a ship or in an outlying colony was ready to offer a new chance to the beautiful spark that would be reborn her daughter.
The medic turned off the engine, and watched for a few moments as her spark's pulse became erratic and began to flutter then dim. He cut the power to her own engine and listened to it whine down with her spark. He engulfed her in his field, so her spark could feel that it would be missed even if her consciousness had been gone long before now.
It dimmed to darkness, gave a final glow of defiance, then went out. He felt her fade from the awareness of his field, going up and away. Then, he was alone with a table of lovely spare parts.
"RATCHET!"
Something sent a jolt right up his back struts, startling him into summoning his bayonets as he spun to face his attacker. And, a terrified-looking blue femme threw herself into his arms.
"Ar … Arcee?" He blinked, trying to reset his optics.
She sobbed into his chest, and all he could think to do was cautiously wrap his servos around her. Understandably skeptical, he turned his helm and looked behind him at the table and felt a staticy surge race through his circuits to see the empty chassis still there and sparkless.
But, the femme in his arms felt real as he gently pushed her away to see if it was her.
"I'm not dead! You IDIOT!" she screamed and punched him square in the jaw.
He jumped back, and fell off his stool onto the floor with a crash. Reorienting himself, he bolted up and looked around him at his lab. She was gone, but his spark was still racing. He got up and looked at the femme on his table. Her spark was still pulsing, her engine was still humming. Both of the backups were still running.
Just a dream. Oh, Primus – he must have blacked out.
Well, he was awake now, but not for much longer he realized, checking his stats out of habit. He was on the cusp of emergency stasis.
Stumbling, he grabbed a cube of energon out of a cabinet and refueled, fighting back the dizziness of lack of recharge.
It had felt so real. He still felt his spark aching with loss.
It could wait. He needed to recharge.
Arcee felt terrified and alone again. She shouldn't have hit him, no, but the fragger had pulled her plug! Didn't he see her? Where was everyone?
She didn't want to be here! The lights began to fade back to their twilight gray again, and the med bay lost its clarity. She'd thought for sure, she'd gone to the Pit at first, but she felt Ratchet close by. Frag, she'd SEEN him just now.
Arcee had tried looking for anyone else, but leaving base had been even more frightening. It seemed like the further she got from the med bay, the blurrier her environment became. Out of desperation, she'd gone all the way to Jasper once, only to find a grid of streets and vague, boxy landmarks. Beyond that, it went white, and she'd lost her nerve and come back before she got too far to find her way back.