A/N: I am not a doctor, nor am I a medical professional. Let's just pretend that I know what I'm talking about.

4. The Doctor

Evenings on this planet were the hours that the Autobot's resident medical officer had come to appreciate the most. There was a darkened stillness in the atmosphere that wasn't present on Cybertron, even before the war. Their homeworld had always been overdeveloped and loud, cities and infrastructure covering large swaths of the planet, leaving little room for growth. What Cybertron had left in the way of "frontier" wasn't much more peaceful, especially after the chaos had begun. The magnetic winds were only background noise compared to the constant roar of battle in the air and on the ground. It had been a very long time since Ratchet had experienced peace and quiet. Every nanosecond was spent running from one end of an infirmary to another, constantly on the edge of collapse while having to focus on saving the lives of the catastrophically damaged and maimed; victims of a war that disgusted him.

This planet, while not home by any means, had finally offered a desperately needed respite from all the horrors that they had fled. Their circumstances were not ideal; their situation was quite dire actually, but at least the evenings in their environment were quiet .

Humanity, for all its faults, had at least managed not to destroy everything yet, though they were hurtling towards their own ruin at a breakneck pace. It just so happened that the Autobot's fleeing ship had crashed in the middle of land their institutions were still making an effort to protect, so that meant it was wild and unpopulated—by humans at least. They were too deep in the dense growth of forest, buried nearly all the way into the base of a dormant volcano, for any human to really come near. Apparently Cybertronian construction was more resilient than the Earth's geological constructs. There was local wildlife, but their presence tended to keep them out of the area.

That meant everything stayed quiet and, perhaps somewhat guiltily, Ratchet preferred this to what they had left behind. He missed home of course; was desperate to return to it because he knew what was at stake. Not everyone on board the Ark shared his feelings, which was understandable. This was not home. The only exception might have been Bumblebee who was more adaptive, but Ratchet knew he would get over it once he got older. Ratchet was far too old to harbor misguided notions of sentimentality about their temporary habitat, especially when there were still so many left on Cybertron that were dying and suffering. But, he had already sacrificed so much, so for the time being, the Autobot medic savored the opportunity to rest.

It was why he tended to prefer watching the monitors in the evenings, having volunteered to do it when they were first abruptly woken from stasis by Teletraan-1 decades prior. The ship's AI had detected increased geological activity in the area which had triggered the emergency systems. Core personnel had been woken first, with the rest of the Autobots still in stasis in the depths of the ship. Amazingly, they crashed with no casualties, though the ship suffered significant systems and hull damage. Repair was not an option, at least at the moment. Their resources were limited enough, which tended to happen when you were literally chased off your planet with no time to prepare.

So for now, Ratchet watched the perimeter at night. Teletraan-1's security sensors and cameras were still functioning, and the AI was usually the only thing that kept him company. Thankfully, the algorithm was not very talkative. With Optimus Prime and Prowl offsite, he was technically the only authority around, and that meant the others spent time goofing off somewhere else in the parts of the ship that were still habitable.

That was except for Wheeljack, who along with Ratchet was one of the older Autobots in the primary squad of derelict ship custodians. The Autobot engineer was usually more focused on his scientific pursuits with the aim of keeping them alive, while also alternating repair projects around the ship. He was generally in Ratchet's vicinity more, considering his technical lab and personal quarters were right next to the infirmary, which also meant there was more opportunity for their engineer to get on his nerves. That said nothing about his ability to somehow land himself in the infirmary through sheer negligence alone, quite often . Wheeljack called it experimentation, while Ratchet called it stupidity.

To his credit, Wheeljack had been taking less risks lately, considering how much energon it would require to put him back together after one of his projects went wrong. He could at least be responsible with his wonton damage when he needed to.

Despite how much of a profound pain in the aft Wheeljack was, he was invaluable, and also a deeply close friend. Because they were practically attached at the hip during the war, Ratchet knew how Wheeljack's processor worked better than anyone else. That was why when he found out where their meager supply of an energon equivalent was coming from, he hadn't been quite as upset with Wheeljack as he probably should have been. Wheeljack thought he was doing the right thing, and truthfully, Ratchet had needed the energon—synthesized or not—more than he needed to take a moral stand against petty theft.

Optimus Prime would not agree, but Optimus Prime didn't need to know. Ratchet certainly wasn't going to tell him. It would take a massive slip-up for him to find out.

There was a silent understanding between them, where he would let Wheeljack know that it was time. He wouldn't need to be terribly specific, because the engineer seemed to always know what he meant anyway. So far, they had been lucky and hadn't been caught by the humans, and none of the other Autobots really wondered specifically how Wheeljack was able to keep them supplied. They just trusted that he knew what he was doing, and he did, just not in the way that they thought when it came to their energon stores.

So when Ratchet saw Wheeljack's signature returning on their monitors that night, he wasn't surprised. He had been expecting it, because he had told Wheeljack himself—nonverbally—that they needed more energon, and he didn't ask questions. Sideswipe had needed extensive repairs on a dislocated shoulder and pectoral plate rupture after finding out that rockslides generally didn't appreciate an audience. It used up everything they had.

However, as he watched Wheeljack's approach, it suddenly became apparent that something was wrong. The Autobot was moving faster than normal—certainly faster than any normal human vehicle would be able to move, especially without drawing unwanted attention from authorities. Since the forest roads were secluded, and were largely defunct from Ratchet's understanding of the area's history, there weren't any humans patrolling it anyway. That didn't make it any less suspicious however, and Ratchet's anxiety immediately started to prickle at the back of his neck.

"Wheeljack, what are you doing!? Are you being chased?" Opening a com link, Ratchet was immediately met with a startled wall of emotion, almost as if the occupant on the other end wasn't expecting to be contacted.

"No." The reply was immediate, and abrupt. It was obvious something was wrong, but Wheeljack was hesitating. The tension apparent on their communication channel made Ratchet's proverbial hackles raise. "But we have a problem."

"Who's we in this scenario?" Ratchet fired back, feeling the heat of his temper flare from just this simple back-and-forth. Wheeljack was being frustratingly cagey about why he was traveling at speeds he wasn't even sure a Cybertronian would deem safe outside the race tracks.

"I need your help," Wheeljack clarified, and it was at this point Ratchet knew something was really wrong. His tone of voice, usually much more… manic, sounded wrong. So much for his quiet evening.

"What did you do? Are you hurt?" Ratchet wasn't sure if he should be angry just yet, because it was entirely possible that Wheeljack was gravely injured and he just couldn't tell on the scanners yet. He said he wasn't being chased , so what could possibly have Wheeljack so rattled—wait— "Wheeljack why is there an organic signature on you?!" It was hard to detect initially with Teletraan-1's scanners, but it was there; faint, beneath Wheeljack's own personalized spark trace, but now unmistakable.

"Just wait—" Wheeljack was finally off the road, and had arrived through the Ark's broken loading bay. Ratchet immediately left the monitors to meet him, and at first he wasn't sure what to think as Wheeljack looked fine, except for the way he frantically transformed to his feet in a stunted, awkward manner that he had never seen before. The medic's first assumption was that he was injured, possibly by a human, and the traces of an organic reading on him meant that the hapless creature had picked a fight they wouldn't win. It was a short-lived thought as soon as he saw why Wheeljack had been so delicate in his transformation. Now he was just livid.

Livid, and for the first time completely out of his depth as he stared with cold fear at the human that Wheeljack currently held in his hands. From what he could tell with cursory scans, the human was alive, just unconscious, but there was something else that had Ratchet alarmed.

It was the active energon he could sense on it.

"What happened?" Ratchet quickly recovered from his disbelief and wasted no time motioning for Wheeljack to follow him to the infirmary. One of the perks of all the other Autobots tending to avoid being in his company meant that the infirmary would be empty. One didn't tend to hang out with the medic, because that typically meant you were with him for a reason. They wouldn't be bothered, and absolutely no one else could know about this.

"I.. I don't know…" Wheeljack faltered, and already Ratchet could hear the guilt in his words. "The energon cube…" He trailed off distantly as he followed closely behind Ratchet nearly at his heels. Wheeljack not knowing something wasn't necessarily out of the ordinary, but it had never instilled such an oddly distant emotional response in him. He was usually excited about the prospect of finding some new obscure knowledge to fill his processor. This was different, and Ratchet had to know exactly what had happened to cause this.

"Put the human here," Ratchet said curtly in an attempt to redirect what he knew to be Wheeljack's racing thoughts, rounding around a medical berth once they made it into the infirmary and motioning for him to put it down.

It was not unnoticed by Ratchet how carefully and delicately Wheeljack figured out how to lay the unresponsive human down on a surface generally reserved for much larger Cybertronians. The Autobot was practically wilting right before Ratchet's optics, and for a microsecond the medic wondered if he was going to have to treat him too. He had never seen Wheeljack so completely slumped in defeat, armor panels hanging slack off his body as if he was going to fall apart right in front of him. While they had been able to keep petty theft from the humans a secret from Prime for this long… bringing an actual human into their midst—an injured human to be exact—posed a whole new set of problems that were going to be very hard to avoid.

Ratchet would have to think about that part later, because first there was the issue of the human's injuries needing his attention. He had no idea where to begin, seeing as this was his first time even encountering a human in this type of setting. There was never a need to know how to treat a human, so he was pretty uncomfortably blind. When it became apparent that he was hesitating, Wheeljack said without even looking up.

"Internet." He was staring down at the human with a concerning level of grief, arms hanging limp at his sides. "She hit her head when she went down." What the Pit happened?!

Right. That question remained on Ratchet's thoughts as he quickly tapped into the planet's Internet database through Teletraan-1's remote connection, mining it for whatever he could on human anatomy and physiology. The entire process took mere seconds, and he now had a basic grasp of what it meant to treat a human; something he had hoped it would never come to. Ratchet wished for a lot of things that he couldn't have, but he wasn't going to dwell on it. He wasted no time with initial scans to see what he was dealing with: Blunt force trauma to the head, which matched Wheeljack's very vague retelling of what happened. Superficial bleeding at the site of impact where there was a large laceration that would need manual mending. There were no other signs of internalized cranial trauma above or below the skull, but the inflammation pattern and tissue damage suggested an impact at a fairly high velocity. That meant—

"Wheeljack, this human should be dead." That significant of an impact to the skull, itself a meager protection for the squishy, organic brain beneath, should have meant instant termination. It was all so fragile and almost pointless from an evolutionary standpoint that it almost made Ratchet mad thinking about how inefficient it all was.

Wheeljack jolted at Ratchet's analysis and immediately his optics snapped up to meet his. He looked nervous, now rubbing his hands together as if he desperately wanted to do something with them to keep his processor distracted from what was currently going on.

"I didn't..." The engineer started to say, and Ratchet frowned, realizing that Wheeljack probably thought it looked like he had intentionally caused this. That idea never even occurred to Ratchet, because it was unthinkable. Nevertheless, something happened and Wheeljack knew.

"I know you didn't, but you need to tell me what happened." Ratchet said, reverting his attention back down to the human who was deteriorating. Its breathing was more rapid than he knew it should be, and its blood pressure kept dipping; it was an odd physiological combination that had no other explanation other than the energon. The energon would need to be dealt with somehow, but the injury was more urgent. Trying to lift the human's comparatively small head was an exercise in restraint, but it was immediately apparent that Wheeljack, and his scans had been right. The back of its head was soaked with the red fluid that was human blood, matted and congealed within the organic hair fiber creating a mess. At first Ratchet considered shearing it all off to get it out of the way, but something told him that would be a mistake. This human's hair was... long and unnatural to the extent that he had to assume it was intentional, which meant it was probably something of great significance. The last thing he needed was a human yelling at him; assuming it survived at all.

"She found me. Knew where I was somehow. I got careless and lingered too long and she confronted me and—" Wheeljack started to explain, and it was incredibly distracting.

"—Are you telling me that this human confronted you? It wasn't terrified?" Ratchet clarified without looking up.

"She ." Wheeljack corrected. "Her name is Allison." Ratchet winced in annoyance, wondering why the identity of the human was so important. How did he even know the human's name? Wheeljack didn't elaborate further and turned his back, appearing to want to change the subject. Ratchet could see him surveying the supply shelves in the periphery of his vision as if he was trying to formulate his own potential treatment solution for an organic creature that shared no physiological similarities to their own kind. "The energon…" Wheeljack trailed off, lost somewhere out in the cosmos and Ratchet knew he wasn't going to get any more answers out of him right then and there. That wasn't his priority anyways.

"This wound needs to be cleaned," Ratchet muttered to himself, faintly realizing that he wasn't sure if he had the right chemicals and materials to clean and close the wound. With delicate fingers, and an incredible amount of practiced precision, he was able to pull apart the clumps of fiber to reveal the chaotic damage pattern of a blunt-force wound through the human's skin. It was still slowly oozing fluids, but there wasn't significant enough blood loss to be a threat. The skin was swelling around the tear, but any major bleeding had stopped. Concussion was still a likely possibility, but the human was already unconscious. Infection was a major risk, so it would need to be sanitized properly.

This was the moment that all of Wheeljack's pent up terror finally exploded in a manic energy, directed at none other than Ratchet's dwindling medical repair supplies. He was tearing things off the shelves, looking for what he assumed to be anything they could use as an antiseptic chemical. Finding this highly alarming and counterproductive, Ratchet stopped what he was doing and intervened.

"Wheeljack, stop tearing apart the infirmary! You aren't going to find what you need by throwing everything around!" He was just fast enough to stop him from potentially destroying a very large containment vessel by dropping it in his haste—something which Ratchet very much needed.

"Hydrogen Peroxide!" Wheeljack blurted as he spun around. His optics had gone wide and he froze, waiting for Ratchet's judgment. He sounded incredibly stressed, more so than usual.

Hand still grasped firmly around the engineer's wrist, hovering between them where Ratchet had stopped him as he was turning around—he could not trust Wheeljack wouldn't impulsively throw said item in an effort to expedite the process—the medic finally understood what his outburst had meant. Hydrogen Peroxide, a disinfecting agent, and Wheeljack was holding it aloft between them.

"That'll have to do," Ratchet grunted, letting go of Wheeljack's arm so that he could hand it over properly. It was possible that Ratchet ripped it out of his grasp a bit more forcefully than he should have. "You still haven't answered my question," the medic called over his shoulder as Wheeljack followed him back to the table, his prior outburst fizzled out and depleted. In the interim Ratchet sub-spaced an anti-static cloth, typically used to stem energon loss on wounded Cybertronians, and began to clean the human's head. "What happened? "

"...I told you. She found me." Ratchet couldn't tell if Wheeljack was now being intentionally obtuse, or he was really that oblivious under present circumstances.

"Let me ask a better question then, who is this human, and how did this happen?"

Wheeljack looked to the side, clearly avoiding Ratchet's gaze. "Technically that's two questions…"

"Wheeljack."

There was a very prolonged pause where the light behind Wheeljack's optics dimmed, before shifting as the engineer looked at everything but Ratchet in the room. He was stalling, but rather than press him in that moment the medic was more concerned with the actual job he needed to do.

Eventually Wheeljack faltered, air cycling through him as he formulated a response.

"Eh—well—remember that time some cycles ago when you caught me stealing?" Wheeljack was still looking sideways, avoiding Ratchet's withering glare as he looked up from his task. "The first time I mean."

Ratchet leaned forward over the prone, unconscious human, hands braced against the berth as he looked at the other Autobot square in the optics. There was no way. "Wheeljack. You're not telling me this is—" Of course Ratchet remembered what Wheeljack was referring to: the first of many times the irresponsible fool had snuck out behind everyone's afts to steal energy from the humans. Something else had made that particular time different from the others.

"Yeah… it is." Wheeljack practically caved in on himself, guilt and shame making him nearly fold over into a posture of submission and despite his utter annoyance, Ratchet hated to see him this way.

"This is the human that saw you." Ratchet didn't know how it was possible, so many years later that Wheeljack would just happen to blunder into the same human twice. And of course, it would be Wheeljack to do something so monumentally careless. What were the odds? Unless—

"She found me." Wheeljack finally said, looking down at the floor in defeat. "I think… she figured out what I was up to because she… remembered; came looking for me."

—Unless the human had the sense and knowledge to be able to find him on their own… but how?

Ratchet also distinctly remembered telling Wheeljack to deal with it when he'd revealed that a human had seen him. He hadn't meant for him to terminate it of course, but Wheeljack had never shared exactly what went on that night and Ratchet had never asked. When he'd returned to the Ark, he'd certainly noticed that Wheeljack had been… bothered by something, and it was so out-of-character for the Autobot that Ratchet had actually asked him what he'd done. All he'd said was that he'd handled it—and it wouldn't be a problem. Maybe, Ratchet should have pried a bit more, to ask him what exactly he'd done that night, but he'd trusted that Wheeljack would resolve the issue without compromising their safety, and his morals.

He'd certainly done one of those. Whether or not there was any reason to be concerned for their safety now was up for debate.

"What happened that night?" Now though, to get a better sense of why he was trying to figure out how he was going to stitch a human's head wound—the very same human that had run into Wheeljack decades prior—Ratchet needed some answers. Specific answers.

It was suddenly as if a dam broke. Wheeljack unfolded from his slumped position and went completely stiff as he stood straight, armor panels flared in distress. "She was just a child Ratchet. I wasn't—I couldn't just leave her there alone—" Wheeljack's explosive defensiveness seemingly out of nowhere hinted at some repressed guilt the engineer had been hiding for some time. All Ratchet could do was raise a brow plate at him, silently allowing him to get out whatever it was he needed to. "—She… she wasn't afraid of me… she was actually excited to talk to me, and Primus I just stayed and… talked to her for a little while and she was so happy, until I had to go because—" His voice had gotten incrementally quieter as he continued, the memories that it seemed he'd been holding in for some time quite literally taking him back to something that had clearly had a great deal of an effect.

"—That's enough, Wheeljack." If Ratchet hadn't cut in, he ran the risk of sitting there listening to Wheeljack explain himself for an eternity.

"Her father eventually came to retrieve her. Didn't see me. But I didn't talk to her again after that. Kept my distance." He stopped, as if collecting himself for the moment, and as he continued to speak the words were slower and much more deliberate. "Eventually, stopped checking in on her to… make sure and figured I'd never see her again. I guess I underestimated human memory…" Wheeljack didn't need to finish that thought, because it was clear what had happened.

A lot of things were starting to make sense now: Wheeljack's withdrawal when he'd returned, lasting for some time where now something Ratchet had suspected was confirmed. He had been checking on the human, presumably to make sure she hadn't put them all at risk and that it was safe to not escalate the situation. Eventually, satisfied or otherwise, Wheeljack had stopped disappearing for prolonged periods of time.

Wheeljack hadn't wanted to, because he had been lonely and wanted to feel like he had a connection, even if it remained from a distance and unseen. The short time he had talked with the human child had been meaningful enough to make him linger, and that confirmed a number of Ratchet's fears all at once.

"Until she found you." All Ratchet could do was vent air, wincing as he realized he'd done so directly onto the human in front of him. The human… her body didn't react, but that didn't mean he couldn't inadvertently do damage without really trying. For the first time Ratchet… hesitated, an uncomfortable pulse in his spark making him interpret some foreign code impulses that he knew he shouldn't be feeling. He was annoyed; so annoyed , but also… scared.

"I was careless and the humans got a photo of me," Wheeljack started, raising his hands to stave off the almost immediate expletives as it sunk in for Ratchet what that meant. "It was my alt-mode, no need to blow a gasket. But, I think she saw it and figured out where to find me. Smart." Ratchet thought he detected a hint of admiration in that statement, but he was more upset with the fact that Wheeljack could have compromised their entire existence. If he had been caught in bipedal form instead…

That status quo hadn't just been changed, it had been completely overthrown into disarray.

"So let me get this straight. The same human from all those years ago found you, and the energon cube caused this?" Ratchet evened his tone, now more focused on productive results rather than dwelling on things he couldn't change.

Wheeljack shrugged before crossing his arms across his chassis, his optics scanning the ceiling as if to recall what had happened. "I got distracted and the cube overloaded. Couldn't stop it in time and it fell. It bounced, and when it got close to her it reacted like it was reaching out. Never seen that before. The amount of energy it discharged was—"

"—More than enough to kill her. Or should have anyway." Ratchet added, putting the final piece together himself. The implications were troubling but they would have to investigate that later.

The statement hung between them in silence while Ratchet worked. Wheeljack's silence meant that he was deep in contemplative thought, perhaps already trying to piece together the technicalities of what had happened and why. That wasn't Ratchet's area of expertise, though he was not completely ignorant to the physics behind energon storage and production. What Wheeljack was explaining should not have been possible, unless they'd simply never encountered the right conditions to actually test such a reaction.

Ratchet didn't really have the presence of mind to scold the Autobot, who was skillfully avoiding looking at him, intentionally or not. Wheeljack had put them all in so much danger , but for some reason he couldn't bring himself to really blame him for what had happened. It seemed like he was doing enough of that himself already, because they both knew something like this was inevitably going to happen anyway. Ratchet supposed they were at least lucky in this case it had been the same human, as statistically improbable as that was.

Wheeljack, unique as he was, was not an anomaly. Prime had noticed it too, and had spoken to Ratchet about it in passing out of concern. The other Autobots were… restless. Isolation and seclusion was not agreeing with any of them, and the younger amongst them in particular were showing the most severe signs of loneliness. They were growing curious, fascinated by the humans and yearning for some type of contact if only to satiate their increasing desire to know more. By nature, they were social creatures, so the escalating carelessness and diminishing fear of the planet's native inhabitants meant that eventually… the fortified, secure bubble that had been carefully cultivated around them for decades was going to explode in a spectacular fashion. Someone was going to make contact first, intentional or not, and somehow, it was not all that surprising that it was the Autobot standing in front of him.

"I don't have suture material," Ratchet mumbled, and he sensed Wheeljack relax near him, perhaps with the possibility of setting on something more productive. "Might want to start stealing that too." His sarcasm was not lost on Wheeljack who finally smiled then, the action quick but nonetheless obvious as his optical lids narrowed in companionable amusement.

"I knew you'd thank me eventually."

"Well right now we need to stop wasting time. Hand me the…" Ratchet's processor cycled through hundreds of possibilities at once. He had a collection of different monofilament materials typically used to repair delicate energon tubing within a Cybertronian's endoskeleton. "... Polypropylene-sterite thread spool over there," he gestured in the general direction of a partially broken cabinet against the wall, knowing Wheeljack would know what to look for. It was a material that could be absorbed by a Cybertronian's physiology and simply be cycled out as waste. For a human, while it was a material similar to something they would use for their own medical sutures, it was not something they could absorb. That meant eventually they would need to be removed, which also meant…

"The human will need to stay here."

"Eh—what?"

"At least until I can remove the sutures—"

"—Pretty sure a human doctor can do that…"

"If this human walks into an infirmary with expertly applied sutures and no prior documentation to explain them, that is bound to raise questions. We can't risk it, and furthermore we have no idea what the immediate effect of the energon exposure will be." Ratchet could tell that Wheeljack had nothing to argue with, because he loved to argue with him. That meant one of two possibilities was happening: Wheeljack was far more interested in the data that could be collected regarding human exposure to energon to be worried about his blunder being exposed, or he wanted the human to stay. There was nothing stopping both from being true.

"About that energon…"

"Right. Do you have the energon cube that reacted to her, or did you leave that behind for all of humanity to find?" Ratchet had finished closing the wound with great care, having a number of needle options at his disposal and one just small enough to be useful. They were generally used for delicate internal Cybertronian physiology and electrical stimuli for therapeutic reasons, but he was able to manipulate one thin enough so as not to damage the skin further.

"There's no need to be rude, I got it right here." Wheeljack subspaced the glowing energon cube and held it aloft. Ratchet could tell it wasn't completely full, probably because it had expelled some of its stores when it… exploded.

"I think we can use it to get the energon out of her. Hand me that EM absorption array, will you?" Pointing once again to a long, hand-held de-ionization module that was typically used to reverse electro-magnetic build-up. It was a long shot, but he thought that it might be able to pick up the energon—itself a highly charged energy—from the human's body and convert it directly into the cube as something usable.

"You think—" Wheeljack started, the lights behind his optics glimmering as an idea began to fully form. Ratchet was admittedly surprised that Wheeljack hadn't thought of it sooner. "I can modify the cube to interface with your little medical thingy—"

Ratchet scoffed. "—It's not a thingy, it's a very critical piece of equipment that I've had to use on you multiple times when—never mind, we need to move fast because the human's blood pressure is dropping again."

Without needing to be asked twice, Wheeljack placed two fingers on the facing edge of the cube and swiped sideways, revealing the command module where lines of glyphs rapidly filtered across the interface. He typed in several lines of code, the cube making a rather unpleasant squawk twice when he made mistakes, until finally he nodded at Ratchet to indicate that he was finished.

"Is that thing going to work on a human?"

"Unclear," Ratchet said, holding the module aloft by the handle and placing it over the human's body. He sensed a spike in energy when the warm glow of the leading edge spread out over the small organic form, and taking that as a good sign he passed it down the length of her. It was working—slowly, but as he initiated a stabilized scan he could detect a release of sorts, not unlike a valve loosening pressure as the energon slowly siphoned out of her.

The operating word being slowly, Ratchet knew this was going to take a while. Wheeljack had been watching the cube itself, a manic glee passing over him as he shifted his stance excitedly. "It's working… oh, this is going to take forever…"

"No kidding." Ratchet grunted, noting that his joints were probably going to get sore after all this. "I hope you have nothing better to do, because you aren't leaving my sight right now."

There was the matter of what to do when the human actually woke up, so Ratchet supposed they had plenty of time to think about that.