#Regeneration One | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

equivocaleternity · 2 years

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15 megop or 20 dratchet for love askmeme?

(read on ao3)

When Ratchet onlined, it was to the first new sight he’d seen in decades. There was no flat, endless wasteland, no trudging mass of mindless Decepticons in front of him. Just the clean walls of a small room—not that clean, actually, there was dust in the corners, but it wasn’t in ruins, and that was more than Ratchet ever thought—

Oh. He was thinking. He could think. He could process things other than pain and grief and a desperate wish to just die, anything to be free of Megatron’s mind endlessly devouring his own. He could think, and the thinking didn’t hurt. He could think, and his thoughts were his own. He could feel an absence in his mind, a lack that felt sweeter than he ever could have imagined. Megatron wasn’t there anymore. The link he’d felt for so long it felt like eternity was just—gone. If he were able, Ratchet would have cried.

“You’re awake!”

Ratch didn’t stiffen or turn in surprise at the new voice, but only because he couldn’t. He couldn’t move at all. Not even his optics. They were locked open and staring straight ahead. He didn’t have to move, though; the owner of the voice walked in front of him—white, red and gray, brief details of an alt mode that didn’t look like an Earth vehicle—and bent down until they were at eye level.

“Hi, Ratchet,” said a face Ratchet had never expected to see again.

Ratchet stared. It was all he could do.

“Oh, right, you can’t speak, can you? Hold on, I think I can fix that.”

Drift—Drift, of all people—moved forwards, hands disappearing under Ratchet’s line of sight. Touching Ratchet’s throat, probably. Ratchet couldn’t feel it.

Drift was here. How was Drift here?

“You were in pretty rough shape out there, you know. Still are, but I’ve been doing what I can to get you up and running. There. Try to speak now?”

Ratchet felt something clunk into place in his throat—and, oh, he could feel sensation, now. He tried to speak. It wasn’t easy, but his vocalizer clicked on after a few aborted attempts.

“Drift,” he said. “I mean-n—Deadlock. I—”

“You were right the first time, actually,” Drift—Drift—said. He smiled. “I’m back to Drift again. You have no idea how good it is to hear your voice, Ratchet.”

“Meg—Megatron-n-n—”

“Megatron? He’s dead. Almost didn’t believe it at first, but yeah. He’s definitely dead.”

Megatron was dead.

Ratchet had already known that—he’d known it to his spark, that blessed absence in his mind, but hearing it still lifted a weight from him, like he’d escaped the pull of a black hole.

“How-w-w—” Primus forsaken, he couldn’t speak.

“Easy, there, don’t strain yourself.”

Ratchet wished he had arms to cross. “How…did…you. You’re…here. How—”

“Medics really do make the worst patients, don’t they?”

“Not as bad-ad-ad as..Deceptic-cons,” Ratchet said, just to be ornery.

It got a laugh out of Drift. “And you’ve patched up enough ‘cons to know, huh? Bleeding spark Autobot. I’m serious, though! I’m playing it by guess here, Ratchet. If you mess your vocalizer up I don’t know if I’ll be able to fix it again. But to answer your question—it’s a long story.”

Ratchet really wished he had arms to cross.

“And-nd I’m…so busy,” he said, giving Drift an unimpressed look as best he could with most of his face unresponsive.

“Alright, alright! Point made. Just—give me a moment, it’s hard to know where to start.”

“Thought you were—were dead,” Ratchet said. “M-Megatron—Megatron thought—how are-are-are—”

“Was that what people thought? Megatron too? Huh. Explains why I didn’t have to deal with hitmen. I thought maybe he just didn’t want to admit I defected.”

“D-d-d—”

“Defected? Sure did. A while ago, now.” He looked away. “I know it’s rich, me saying it, but I just…I got tired, Ratchet. I got tired of fighting. I got tired of being someone who hurts people just because I can. So I left. Cut contact completely, and just—left.”

“Knew you…could,” Ratchet said.

Drift looked back at him. “You—you really mean that, Ratchet?”

“Y-y-y—”

“Shh, shh, don’t hurt yourself!” He put his hands out like Ratchet was going to fall over and he had to catch him. When Ratchet stopped trying to get the word out, he slowly lowered them. “…thank you. Really. You don’t know how much that means to me.”

Ratchet wanted to say more, but he could feel himself slowing down. Thinking was getting harder and harder.

“I’m…tired,” he said. “But I need—need to know-w what…happened.”

“And I’ll tell you,” Drift said. “Everything I know. But there’s no rush, Ratchet. You can rest if you need to. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Hold-d you…to that,” Ratchet said, and felt himself slip away.

Ratchet got used to life on Drift’s ship—life with Drift—with an ease that surprised him. They fell into a routine, of sorts; whenever Ratchet was awake and had the energy, Drift would work on repairing him, and Ratchet would give direction as best he could. Ratchet had never quite got used to being repaired; it wasn’t his pain tolerance, or that he was afraid of injury, so much as it simply feeling odd. No matter who was doing the repairing, Ratchet always felt like he should be helping them. He knew it was a ridiculous thing to feel, but he’d never been able to shake the worry that he was being lazy just laying around.

It felt even stranger, now. He wasn’t sure he’d ever been in this bad shape, but more than that he’d forgotten what everything felt like. Objectively, he knew it hadn’t been that long. Ratchet’s chronometer was broken, but his hadn’t been, and if Ratchet thought back to before the link was broken, he could access the time logs. Twenty years. A fraction of his life, and yet it made everything before it feel so far away.

Drift helped, though. Whenever Ratchet started to get tired, Drift would put away his tools and they would switch to just…talking. Ratchet had half-expected them to run out of conversation once they’d finished telling each other what they knew about everything that had happened on Earth, but they kept finding new topics.

It’d taken them a while to finish telling each other about Earth, though. They’d both had a lot to catch up on.

Ratchet knew much more than Drift did about events before Megatron had razed the planet, but Drift had learned a good bit of what had happened since then—such as the fact that where they were now was a dead zone. The Dead Zone. Cybertron was a lost cause, but Earth was slowly healing, a home for both humans and nebulons, now. There were places, though, that the humans declared off-limits. Epicenters so radioactive it wasn’t safe for organics to stay in long, and where no signals could get in or out, even with Cybertronian and Nebulan technology. Cybertronians were in no danger, but the humans had made it part of the treaty that no Cybertronian set foot in a dead zone—trust was being rebuilt, but slowly, and the idea of areas where Cybertronian activity couldn’t be monitored made them jumpy, apparently. The site of Megatron’s death, referred now simply as the Dead Zone to differentiate from the others, was especially taboo, and Cybertronians had been forbidden from entering even to retrieve the dead.

“That’s why I came,” Drift had told him. “I was going to pay my respects, give you a funeral if I could. No one else would have gotten in trouble for it—I wasn’t part of the treaty, and there’re clauses about ‘rogue, unaffiliated, or uninformed Cybertronians.’ I’d be punished, since I’m aware of the treaty, but no one else would be unless it’s proved they knew I was going to do it.”

It was painful, Ratchet wouldn’t lie, to know that there were Cybertronians, Autobots, his friends, on the same continent as him, and they’d left his body to rust, but it had soothed the sting when Drift told him they’d fought for a provision to be made allowing to enter with the sole intent of collecting the dead in a hundred year’s time. Starscream, of all people, had been the one to propose it.

The universe outside seemed a tired one, but a kinder one, in many ways. Ratchet grieved all the losses suffered—somehow he’d stopped believing Optimus would ever really die, and even now, poor Buster’s death hit him as hard as some of his oldest comrades’ demises had affected him during the war—but the idea that the war was really, truly, over…there weren’t words that could even begin to describe how it made him feel.

“Well, I’ve got good news and bad news,” Drift said, sitting back on his heels.

Ratchet grimaced. “What’s the bad news?”

Drift gave him a wry look. “You know, I was hoping you would ask for the good news first, but I really should’ve known better, huh? The bad news is that I’ve fixed you up as much as I can without more parts and materials I have here, which was also going to be the good news.”

“Oh,” Ratchet said.

He hadn’t realized Drift had so little to work with. He’d a good job—most of Ratchet’s internals were covered enough that he wasn’t at serious risk as long as he was kept in a clean, stable environment, but there were still plenty of gaps. Considering he wasn’t much more than a head and shoulders, with his torso just a makeshift container for his insides, the fact that Drift was already out of medical supplies didn’t bode well.

“Don’t worry, though,” Drift said. “I can get more parts easy. I’ll just have to make a quick trip outside. I just wanted to let you know I’ll be gone for a bit. I wish I could give you my comm link, but even if comms worked here your comm system is pretty busted, and I don’t have the knowhow to fix it. In any case, you shouldn’t need it. I’ll only be gone a little while, and then—”

“Where are you getting the parts?”

Drift looked at him in surprise. “From outside,” he said. “There’s a bunch of empty frames not far from here.”

“No,” Ratchet said. “We’re not using them.”

“But you need—”

“No,” Ratchet said. His vocalizer grated the word to harsh noise. “I won’t—I don’t want—haven’t they suffered enough?”

Drift went quiet.

“I can’t—I can’t use them,” Ratchet said. “I can’t make them nothing but parts again.”

After a moment, Drift nodded. “Okay, Ratchet,” he said, softly. “I understand. I’ll think of something else.”

He stood up. Ratchet couldn’t see his face when he was standing up—was he looking at Ratchet? Was he upset? Frustrated? Ratchet—he couldn’t take from the Decepticon dead, but there wasn’t any other option if he wanted to get fixed. The likelihood of finding materials suitable for a Cybertronian as damaged and repair-intensive as Ratchet was anywhere in the Dead Zone that didn’t come from a Cybertronian was vanishingly rare. Human machinery worked in a pinch—Ratchet would know, he’d used it enough times, back before…back before Megatron. But it had a much higher rejection rate, and Ratchet only used it when he really had to, or for temporary patch jobs. Ratchet needed almost a full frame restoration. To send Drift off hunting for parts that wouldn’t even work wouldn’t be fair to him.

“Drift,” Ratchet started, unsure how to continue. “You’ve done more than you had to already. I won’t ask you to—”

“What? Sorry, I was lost in thought. I think I’ve got a solution.”

Ratchet blinked. “You—you do?”

Drift knelt back down. “The perfect solution, actually! You don’t want to use the spare frames, and I saw enough of the Dead Zone coming in to guess that there’s not going to be much good searching the rest of it, right? But we can’t go offplanet, either—you’d never make the trip through the atmosphere—so the answer’s simple. My ship is small, but it’s made out of good stuff. I won’t be able to do everything, like limbs, but I can use the plating and wiring to get you fixed up as best as I can.”

Ratchet stared at him. “You can’t do that,” he said. “You need your ship. You can’t get out any other way, it’s weeks to the edge of the Dead Zone, and the terrain is treacherous, you’ve talked about it! How will you leave? How will you—”

Drift put a hand on Ratchet’s patchwork shoulder, and Ratchet stuttered into silence.

“It’s okay, Ratchet,” Drift said. He was smiling. “Didn’t I tell you? I’m not going anywhere.”

#here you go!!#i hope you like it!!!#this took a while but i’m very happy with it #dratchet #ratchet #drift #regeneration one #maccadam #transformers #asks #answers #ask game #fic #my writing

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