Summary: Ratchet's new hands need a calibration.
Author's notes: SO WHAT IF I WRITE FIFTY FICS ABOUT RATCHET'S HANDFS SHUT UP
I am too lazy to look back in the comics to see who was staffing the Lost Light alongside Ratchet post-Red Rust arc, so I'm just gonna make slag up and assume First Aid was there. I also don't know if he had transforming medic tool hands but I'm gonna assume he does because he's forged. Um. This is also assuming Ratchet and Drift had a soft history in Dead End and that Deadlock got reallllll saucy with Ratchet during the main war.
.o
Guilt plagued every moment he looked at those blue hands Drift was carrying. He hadn't asked Drift to do this for him. He didn't want the hands. Those were hands with a history he wasn't fond of. Guilt plagued him when he watched those hands be placed gingerly into the cleaning solvent laced with chemicals that would counteract the effects of the Red Rust.
The servos were taken out of the solution, dried off manually before being sat to dry. First Aid applied local current disruptors to Ratchet's left arm. Despite his mounting trepidation, he felt a wave of relief flow up from his arm as the feeling to his limb was cut off. No more could he feel the ache of his bevels and shafts and sockets that he was privy to each time he booted out of a stasis nap. On the other hand, his right still complained of its abuse, having never been given a day of rest.
When Pharma's hands were sufficiently dried, First aid placed them on the table at Ratchet's side. Ratchet laid flat on the operating table, looking uncomfortable.
"You know you can be asleep for this part," First Aid mentioned as he prepped the tools in his hands.
"But then you'd have to wake me back up for the attachment. There are many more connecting lines running through a medic's hand compared to normal hands, and because Pharma's hands have a different configuration of attachment compared to mine due to his neurosurgeon specialty, I need to be online to diagnose the connections as they're formed to make sure they're the correct ones."
First Aid stared at him. He knew all of that already. "Okay. Well. I'm going to start."
Ratchet was never really jumpy when it came to performing repairs on himself or having someone else perform repairs on him, but when First Aid's cold saw got close to his wrists, his spark become flighty, he felt anxious. Like he needed to defend himself. Those were his hands, the one thing that made him so valuable. Seeing someone take a weapon to it was like putting a knife directly to his spark. He gripped at the edge of the table with his right hand, opting to turn off his vision so he wouldn't have to see his livelihood taken away from him. He focused on the sound of the quiet saw. He knew it was finished when a wave of static feedback had replaced the cool sensation of nothing on his left arm. Current blockers or not, it couldn't stop the unique connective feedback that a medic had to his hands. When those hands were gone, nothing could stop that feeling. Not even replacing them with normal hands, because the circuitry for medical tools remained unconnected to something that delivered feedback.
He opened his optics. It felt like his spark had extinguished when he saw nothing there at the end of his arm. He rationalized to himself that it was only temporary, but sometimes you couldn't quell a panicked spark. First Aid had Pharma's left hand in his. His hand was transformed into the tools required for careful reintegration of two body parts.
"You ready?" He asked.
"Get on with it," Ratchet huffed, resisting the urge to say something mean.
Each line reattaching that hand to his wrist sent a cold wash over his arm before a hot thrum. Ratchet gasped, feeling his temperature trickle up. There were few stories of medics getting new medic hands, so he hadn't been prepared with how good it felt.
It took about a megacycle to successfully attach the hand to his wrist bracket. One hand down, one to go.
"Since both of Pharma's hands have the same configuration, you don't have to be online for the other attachment," First Aid offered, hands whirring back into the cold saw as he eyed Ratchet's right hand.
"We're already halfway done. Might as well keep going instead of wasting time waiting for me to power down." Ratchet felt the urge to move that left hand, to see what it could do, but he knew better than to move it about too early after reattachment.
"If you say so." Shrugging, he got to work.
"We'll have to wait for the current clamps to wear off before calibrating. Should take about 4 megacycles tops," First Aid said. "You want me to help you through that?"
Ratchet rubbed at his arm with his left hand, which had finished self-repairing to the point where it was safe to move it. The sensory feedback was way off. "I'll be fine. Thank you… for all of this."
.o
The sensors needed to be calibrated. It was driving him mad. Drift had noticed when Ratchet couldn't properly hold a datapad without getting frustrated and fidgety.
"I know it must be hard having to be reminded of your colleague every time you look at them. Maybe we can repaint them!" Drift asked cheerfully, his dangling legs kicking from his perch on his berth. Ratchet had decided to take flight here because his spark wouldn't settle. It felt like he needed to take cover until somehow his body could reattach his old hands. It was wholly irrational, and Ratchet was frustrated that his damn spark couldn't bear reason. Due to their history, Ratchet felt comfortable bunkering down in Drift's hab suite rather than the med bay. The med bay that harboured the same monster that had cut his hands off—no… that was his spark talking. The same dutiful medic that helped give him more time as a functioning member of society.
"It's these damn sensors," Ratchet groused. "My hands need to be calibrated." He decided better now instead of waiting to build up the courage to return to the med bay. He'd be able to once he felt like he was performing normally again in the hands.
He started the calibration program which began to run his hands through transformation cycles. The program sent him diagnostics on his pulleys, his cams, his sprockets, his pinions, his actuators… everything that one could detail in operation of a medic's hand. The tools popped out one by one, pins and spacers and ball joints not uttering a word of complaint as they moved as intended. Ratchet's old hands would screech and whine and jitter from years of work and neglect.
Drift was leering and his engine was purring.
"Shut up," Ratchet growled.
"I didn't say anything," Drift retorted, that stupid knowing grin on his face shouting at Ratchet. Drift had never been privy to a recalibration of the hands. The kid had to be getting something out of this. But he felt safer doing it here than in the presence of, say, the mech who took his hands.
He was pleased when the transformation calibration occurred without a hitch.
"Now I need to calibrate the sensors themselves," that gave Ratchet pause. He hadn't done a recalibration in over a thousand stellar cycles. In the academy, medics were expected to do recalibrations each stellar cycle, but war made it difficult, so most of them had to get by on millennia-old calibrations. It didn't account for any minute misalignment of their servos. One could only imagine how many checkups resulted in misdiagnoses due to the medic's scale of readings not being current to the changes their hands had gone through over the years.
"Wanna do me a favour, kid?" Drift was at attention, making Ratchet roll his eyes. "Nothing crazy. I need you to get something from Perceptor."
Ratchet had commed Perceptor before Drift reached his lab, so Drift had no issues retrieving the vials of KCl and NaOH.
"Knocking out two tasks in one, since my sensors also need to calibrate for 'wet' as well," the medic mused as he dipped a finger into the KCl vial. When he brought it to his tongue, Drift had an amusing look of confusion on his face.
"I need a baseline for acids and bases; this calibration programming for medics forces me to use a new readout instead of past ones for pH calibration. My tongue is currently calibrated to read pH correctly, so I have to use that," he explained as he washed the servo off with water before dipping it in the NaOH and repeating the process. "Then I have to see the same measurement in my hands."
"Wait… does this mean you could've been tasting the pH of my valve fluid this entire time when you eat me out?"
Ratchet gives him a look.
"Now calibrating for temperature," he ignored Drift, utilizing the sensors lining his chevron to check the temperature of the air and making sure it aligned with what his hands were reading.
"I'm just saying, if you can read that, what else can you—hmphh!" a digit forced its way into Drift's mouth, interrupting his lewd fantasies. It held for a few kliks before Ratchet removed it.
"Just making sure it could correctly read extreme difference in temperature," Ratchet excused, wiping his digit off.
"You should do that but with all four of your fingers," Drift smirked, tongue poking out from his mouth and wiggling. Ratchet looked away with his face warming.
"Electrical calibration automatically passes every time," he checked off the list, "All that's left is pressure calibration."
The Lost Light didn't have a precision pneumatic press, so he'd have to use someone else to deliver the program's requested PSI.
"Drift, hold my finger," he offered his hand to the ex-con, who eagerly took it.
"Should I shove it in my valve so you can get every range of PSI you need?" his optics were bright with mirth.
"Shut up," Ratchet snarled. "Squeeze at 0.1PSI."
Growing oddly silent, they went through a range of required pressure before it was finished.
"I think we should do a test run to make sure that your hands really are calibrated."
"No."
"Yeah," black hands hitched onto Ratchet's shoulders, drawing him forward and their lips fused into a kiss. Ratchet was shocked to find the mech's surface metal was swelteringly hot. Drift's tongue swept at his cooler metal, asking for entrance, to which Ratchet granted. He relaxed his body, feeling the comfort of properly-tuned hands as he explored those white panels, slipping underneath to play with protoform here and there.
Their glossae battled, Drift always getting a bit nippy (not that Ratchet was complaining), and the ex-con let out little noises of satisfaction. He crawled his way onto his berth, atop Ratchet, settling his weight on top as though it were his rightful place.
Ratchet's tongue sought out every inch of Drift's mouth, laving at the denta plates, the top of his mouth, everywhere… Knowingly manually triggering the production of oral lubricant by sweeping against specific locations.
"The pH of your oral lubricant is 5.4. That's a bit low. Could be explained by that minor nanomite infestation currently plaguing your mouth. A few rinses with mercury should kill them off easily." In that case, Ratchet would also need to rinse his mouth with mercury, as sticking his tongue into that infestation now meant he had it in his mouth. Dammit, Drift.
Drift whimpered in between kisses, engine rocking roughly. "You can tell that just from kissing me?" Drift moaned, a shudder running up his spine. "Frag, tell me more, doc." He grew more aggressive in his nibbling, body rocking against Ratchet's and his fans finally clicked on at their full settings, lest Drift wish to melt from the high internal body temperatures.
"I could if you'd open up," Ratchet suggested, his hands rounding that pert aft, groping shamelessly, sliding their way into the valleys making up the connecting point between Drift's thighs and hips. They pawed with determination, though their aggressive grind was slickened by the fluid squeezing its way out of the seams that lined the valve cover.
"Open it for me," Drift panted, wiggling his hips into Ratchet's hands. Ratchet obliged, finding the manual release, the modesty plate sliding aside. With spike extending and valve exposed, Ratchet claimed land, fingers sliding their way into that wanting valve. Drift slammed back onto those hands, wetter than Ratchet had expected.
He worked his fingers in and out, synching with the pace that Drift set. "The temperature in your valve is 383.15K…" that wrung out another desperate moan from the kid, causing that hot valve to contract more tightly around fingers that were delivering those motions straight to his spark. Ratchet wheezed, his other hand wrapping around Drift's spike. He jerked in time to Drift's erratic thrusts, panels shaking against the table as he doubled the sensation he was receiving. "384.15K… 386.15K…"
"Oh Primus, Ratchet, that's hot, that's so hot, you're reading me," his thighs were trembling so much, the biolights on his spike flaring quicker and quicker; Ratchet could tell he was close.
Ratchet smugly grinned. "Kid, you're so 'hot'." Literally. "C'mon, kid. Gimme some of that heat." He pulled the mech's thighs forward, urging him to climb higher up on his body. Drift did so without question, bucking his hips into that lovely hand.
"R-ratch," Drift tried but failed as a tight squeeze around the base of his spike pulled at the plating in such a way, agitated the sensitive cabling underneath just right, he released.
The angle had been calculated by Ratchet, allowing him to direct the stream of transfluid into his mouth. Most of it hit the target, but as the spurts grew weaker, the rest made landfall across his chest and neck. It would be a pain to get that out of his collar spacing. He'd have to hit the showers soon after this.
A few abortive thrusts later and Drift's spine sagged, elbows landing on either side of Ratchet's head. Condensation on Drift's face dripped down, landing on Ratchet's cheeks. Drift stared foggily down at Ratchet; Ratchet was sure the bot's processor was sluggish, waiting for temperatures to lower before it could return to higher processing capacity.
"You… you didn't overload," Drift whispered. True, he was still keyed up. He didn't mind, watching Drift get off was a treat of its own, but he knew Drift would never leave it alone.
He dragged his fingers through some of the not-yet-dry fluids dirtying his front. He offered his fingers up to the ex-con, who hungrily sucked in four of those fingers.
Mmm, a fresh calibration really brought the best sensations. It didn't take long of thrusting in and out of that hot, squeezing vacuum that overload overtook him, leaving him in a pleasant afterglow of mingling charge.
"Oh yeah, the pH of your transfluid is 6.8. Within normal ranges."
Drift looked down at him hungrily, engine turning over loudly. "I'm gonna need you to say that again when you eat me out."