XFMR - Crush - Crush Part 2
Part 2
Part 1
o o o
/I have to hand it to you/ Wheeljack sent, leading the way into the club. /You really outdid yourself/
First Aid nodded a distracted thanks. They had gone back down to the holding cell two evenings before, and Wheeljack reactivated the auditory sensors. First Aid completely disabled the twins' pain sensory array and his own hearing, and set to work, fixing up old injuries and making careful modifications. The twins had screamed, long and loud into the night; curses at first, and threats, which turned to pleading and finally wordless, broken noise. The three of them had communicated via carefully controlled tight-beam messages.
First Aid learned that the two had been Autobots who defected very early on, thinking the violent Decepticons more to their tastes. They spent a while in the ranks before deciding that uncontrolled psychopathy wasn't to their liking, and turned again, their attentions directed to sabotage and assassination from within. They were caught, and Megatron made them his own pet fighters in the ruins of the Simfur temple. They had been given to Brawl, one of Megatron's favored glitches, as a gift, and from Brawl to View.
He also learned that the two preferred very up close and personal weaponry, but View had them fitted with gaudy rifles and forbidden them from preferring their blades. Sunstreaker was armed with talons in his hands and feet that could tear through armor like it was gold flake. Sideswipe had singular blades in each arm that nearly doubled his reach. Both had their feet locked into place over their alt-mode wheels, preventing them from using their wheels in their bipedal forms. First Aid removed the restrictive locks and pulled out the mostly-useless cannons at their request.
The empty areas, however, he left open, subtly crimping the energon connections further inside their bodies to prevent a slow drain. The flopping, uncapped energon connections and bared wires appeared to be gruesome, painful wounds, and he affect similar wounds across their bodies. Not a single one was deeper than superficial, and he steadfastly refused to expose any of their truly vital components. Sunstreaker, grinning nastily, suggested he incorporate some of their removed components as a decoration, and Sideswipe wove him a circle of torn wire from both of them. It rested on First Aid's chest like a cadaver, but he wore it anyway. He did not like such a memento. The doctor would.
The mechs in the cells around them, he discovered later, spent the night in sheer terror. The security mechs who monitored the auditory sensors, and the poor mech who went into the cell in the morning to clean the spattered energon off the walls, were deeply disturbed, and already, rumors spread like scraplets. Ironhide and Wheeljack decided to wait an orn before debuting their success in the arenas.
And it worked. Sideswipe and Sunstreaker followed at the doctor's heel, heads down and flinching away from loud noises. Mechs whispered and speculated; the twins usually entered the arenas in null cuffs, snarling at others and fighting their bonds. What had the cruel doctor done to them, to tame them so? Others stared - in horror, in delight, in wonder - at the energon-encrusted gaps in their armor, and murmured about the audial file circulating, where one could hear the two fighters weeping and each begging to end his brother's misery. What had happened in the tiny cell?
Hinge found them a table and the twins arranged themselves at the doctor's feet in ancient poses of slavery and submission. The doctor idly pet Sideswipe's helm as he took stock of the room. Mechs blatantly stared and murmured behind their hands, and the air was thick with tight-beams. All optics were on them.
A mech finally worked up the bravery - or perhaps the level of over-energization, judging by the swaying - necessary to approach them. "Such a waste," he grumbled, rudely poking his finger into the empty space in Sunstreaker's arm. Sunstreaker didn't move. "Can they even fight anymore?"
"They can fight," the doctor replied mildly.
"Right," the mech snorted. He leaned down in Sideswipe's face. "I could knock him over right now, and he's too cowed to even twitch."
"You think that."
The mech straightened just enough to get in the doctor's face instead. "You broke your toys, medic," he sneered softly. "And you let me get too close."
A gun glittered in the mech's hand. Lightning fast, Sideswipe lunged, plunging his blade up and through the mech's chest. Hinge tittered. The doctor smiled and took a sip of high grade that tasted like rusty sludge as the mech choked and shook and died.
Sunstreaker rose and both twins grabbed the corpse, tossing it over the railing down into the pit. They sank back down in tandem, no sign of the violence save the fresh energon dripping down Sideswipe's hand from the blade casing and the quiet, rapid conversations circling the room.
o o o
It took a little under a groon. They never challenged another but let the fights come to them. At the doctor's order - which was really First Aid's quiet plea - each fight was over with as quickly and neatly as the twins could manage. Their popularity surged with each short, vicious battle; First Aid lifted View's idiotic orders on vapid, gaudy displays of power, and the raw killing potential the twins displayed instead was thrilling to the audience, something rarely seen.
A few mechs challenged Stonegrip and occasionally Hinge instead. Those fights rarely lasted any longer. Ironhide was too jaded and battle-forged to indulge in cruelty, and Wheeljack was simply too fast.
When the mech with the overly expensive inlays approached him, First Aid could have wept with relief. Despite never lifting his hand to another, the death of each mech his friends killed weighed heavily on his spark. Their faces haunted him, chasing away recharge, and each night spent cruising between the gaudy, death-fueled clubs was eating away at his sanity.
Ratchet was still out there, somewhere. He couldn't afford to fall, not yet. He leaned on the railing of the pit, watching with an air of boredom as Sunstreaker ripped through a mech's chest. The other mech leaned beside him, a respectful distance away, acutely aware of Stonegrip looming behind them. "I always did like watching those two," he said, almost managing to sound friendly.
The doctor inclined his head slightly. "Oh?"
"Mmm. At Chalak. They used to be Brawl's toys."
"So I've heard."
The mech handed him a strip of achingly blue metal, embossed with the sign of Chalak - an optic ripped from it's setting. First Aid's plating crawled at touching it. "You should come by some night," the mech said, standing again. "I'm sure Brawl'd love to see them again."
o o o
He was finished. As finished as he would ever be. The next time Brawl came for him, he'd be ready.
o o o
Chalak was the worst yet.
The building was a charnel house, with body parts strung from the ceilings in gruesome garlands. Sobbing mechs were chained in the corners with their chest plates peeled back and their sparks exposed, free to anyone for whatever use they wished. The center, like most clubs, was dominated by a broad, sunken pit, but the bodies of the dead were rarely cleared out and the floor was uneven with trampled corpses and slick with old oil. Every fight in Chalak was a fight to the death, with no quarter given and any mech who showed mercy or hesitation was the next victim.
In the center of the audience, with the best seats, was a terrible retinue composed of some of the most vicious, debased Decepticon's in Megatron's entire army. They hollered and cheered on their favored fighters and shared a minibot between themselves, forcing the mech to overload them or mutilating him as they saw fit. The mech shook and wept, and First Aid nearly purged his tanks when he saw the mech's face. His optics had been ripped out and hung over the pit as the night's first energon spilt.
One of them probably had Ratchet.
Their blue ticket got them seats horribly close to the Decepticon retinue. Sideswipe and Sunstreaker assumed their poses of submission, and so close to them, First Aid could feel them shaking in rage. The first few fights passed in a blur of fluids and scraped metal, and not until Stonegrip growled a warning that First Aid realized they had company.
One of the mech's was small, just barely not a minibot, with jet armor and a cruel grin. The other was huge, easily them Prime's mass, though not his height, a blocky brute with enough firepower bristling between armor gaps that he could seriously give Ironhide a run for his credits.
"I told you," the smaller mech spat, waving at the kneeling twins. "It's them. Look at them."
The larger mech bent down, peering curiously from unintelligent optics. "Damn," he muttered. "You're right."
The smaller mech planted his clawed hands on his hips, giving the doctor a frank look. "How in the Pit did you tame them?" he demanded.
Hinge giggled, carving the edge of their table into scallops with a finger transformed into a laser etcher. "The good doctor's really good with his hands," he grinned. "A real miracle worker."
The big mech's facial plates rippled. "A miracle worker?" he asked. "You a medic?"
The doctor toasted the mech with his energon. "No such thing," he said mildly. "Just a mech with an interest in how other mechs work."
"Hn." He peered close at the doctor's face, and no one missed the way Sunstreaker and Sideswipe tensed in warning. "You did a good job with them," he rumbled. "I might show you my own project later. Maybe you can help."
"I look forward to it," the doctor replied, bending his considerable will towards not cringing. The mech smelled like death.
"That's Brawl," Sideswipe hissed after the two Decepticons left. "Despicable bastard."
"Isabax's favored son," Sunstreaker added. "Forged in her own image."
"Be careful," Stonegrip growled, looking directly at the doctor. "Be very careful."
Long breems passed. Mechs died by the score. Sunstreaker and Sideswipe participated in a few of the fights, adding just enough dramatic flare to their kills to satisfy the watching horde. And the Decepticon's toy collapsed.
Sideswipe and Sunstreaker were just starting another fight when it happened. The sightless, broken mech was pinned by the black mech and his spark chamber was being carved into thin slivers of metal by a laser knife when he made a choking, staticy noise and fell into hard recharge. First Aid could not help sending out a scan, and found the mech terribly close to death, hanging on by the thinnest strings. The black mech sneered his disgust and punctured the connection between main energon line and spark chamber with his knife. "Here," he said, shoving the mech towards Brawl. "Another treat for your pet to play with."
Brawl threw the dying mech over his shoulder and stood ponderously. He stomped towards the lift at the back of the club, but paused, looking back. "You wanna see a miracle worker, doctor?"
Miracle worker. Ratchet. Tiny hope bloomed in his spark. "Certainly," the doctor replied, standing to follow.
The mech over Brawl's shoulder was dying in slow waves. First Aid stood just behind him in the lift, looking up at the tiny mech's ruined face. The mech twitched and groaned and spilled energon over Brawl's massive shoulder. He couldn't stand it. What ever Brawl had in mind for the mech, it could be nothing good. Slowly, carefully, he reached up and plugged a single finger into a datajack on the mech's neck. The command he entered was one he swore he'd never use, one rarely taught to anyone but medics working triage. The command killed, with surprising quickness, simply cutting the processor off from the body and spark. It was a back door to provide merciful deaths to mechs such as this, who were doomed to die slow, horribly painful deaths.
The mech stopped twitching. First Aid felt like throwing himself off of the nearest balcony.
Brawl led the way from the lift, down a featureless hall to a featureless door. He swung the mech off his shoulder, then grimaced. "Damn," he muttered. "Barricade went too far." With a shrug, he tossed the dead mech aside and opened the door.
An emancipated, hagard wraith met them. How the mech was still alive, First Aid had no idea. Hunks of armor were torn off, and huge areas of terribly exposed internal piping glinted in the light. The mech's spark chamber glimmered at the seam, the metal bent until it didn't quite shut right. All of the signs of cobalt contamination and brittling disease were evident, along with simple, haunted madness.
It was Ratchet.
First Aid stared, shocked beyond thought. Ratchet, barely clinging to a morbid mockery of life. Ratchet, lifting dead-burning optics as they entered the door. Ratchet, staring at Brawl with pure, unbridled hatred. "It's about time," he rasped. "I've been waiting for you."
Brawl paused. Clearly, this wasn't the norm, and he was uneasy. "Waiting?" he repeated.
"Waiting," Ratchet confirmed. He lifted his arm, and the grating noises his hand made as it transformed would sound right at home downstairs, in the pit. Painfully, his hand became a cannon that thrummed with sick energy, cobbled together with desperation and an amateurs touch. "Waiting a long time," he finished, aiming the cannon at Brawl's spark.
Brawl let out a wheezing laugh. "You really expect to hurt me with that?" he asked. Ratchet didn't answer, letting the charge build. Brawl grinned and threw his arms out. "Go right ahead," he said. "One clear shot, then I'm tearing your head off, miracle worker."
"I'll show you a miracle," Ratchet muttered, and fired.
Green fire filled the world. First Aid dove to the side as the blast ripped through the air, engulfing Brawl and throwing him back through the door and through the wall across the hall. Brawl screamed something, in rage and pain, and disappeared in a pile of rubble. First Aid sat up and nearly wept. Parts of Ratchet's arm were fused in place, and the gun smoked unhealthily. And he was aiming it directly at First Aid now.
"Ratchet," he whispered. "Ratchet, it's me. It's First Aid."
"Liar," Ratchet said dully. "First Aid wouldn't come to a hell like this." The cannon hummed, the energy building again.
First Aid held out his hand, bending his hand back to expose one of his datajacks. "Confirm for yourself," he offered. "I came here to find you, Ratchet. Me, Wheeljack, Ironhide; we came for you." Ratchet stared at him, swaying slightly. "A fuse," First Aid said quietly. "I handed you a fuse, after Wheeljack and Ironhide interfaced you into unconsciousness. It was one of yours, blown; you were furious for a groon but you kept it in your office, on the shelf where you didn't think anyone would noti-"
The charge in the gun dissipated and Ratchet fell to his knees, reaching out to touch him with a trembling hand. "First Aid?" he whispered. "Truly?"
First Aid let out a sob and drew Ratchet into his arms, holding him tightly. Ratchet clung to him, and First Aid sent a hard signal on the Autobot frequency last in use when they left Tyger Pax.
/I found him!/
o o o
The message hit like a speeding megabot. Wheeljack and Ironhide shared a brief, eternal glance over Sunstreaker's head. Ratchet. First Aid had found Ratchet.
Unfortunately, a few of the mechs in the echoing room looked up as well, frowning thoughtfully. They had to get out, and soon.
The time it took First Aid to get back down the lift was forever. He walked out, supporting a broken shell of a mech with a distorted, smoking cannon in place of his left hand. The two sidled towards one of the doors out of Chalak, depending on the attraction of the pit to distract anyone who might-
"Isn't that Brawl's miracle worker?" Barricade asked, red optics spun down suspiciously.
Mechs began to turn towards the fleeing pair. Abruptly, Ironhide stood and followed after them, Wheeljack and the twins close behind. They didn't have long before they were challenged, and the closer he was to them when it happened, the better.
The door to the lift exploded open. Brawl burst from the wreckage with an enraged scream, every weapon primed to fire and bits of his armor oddly charred. He caught sight of Ratchet just as Ratchet lifted the twisted wreckage of his hand and the blast caught a clump of surprised mechs instead of its target. Brawl thundered towards Ratchet with murderous intent, and Ironhide spun his cannons out of their hiding places in his legs, cursing the need to take a tick to reconnect the wiring.
Ratchet's next blast caught Brawl full on, but it was weaker than the previous; the gun was starting to break down. Brawl slammed back and immediately started to rise again, grinning sickly. The Decepticons companions were beginning to rouse themselves, led by Barricade, and Ironhide lifted his cannons and shot Barricade point-blank.
Brawl whipped around, optics flaring at the sight of Ironhide's iconic cannons. "You," he spat, bringing a missile launcher around to bear.
"Me," Ironhide replied grimly, firing at the mechs turning on him. Wheeljack, out of nowhere, landed on Brawl's shoulders and tore the missile launcher off, releasing a few nasty little EMP bugs down into Brawl's armor before leaping to safety. Brawl snarled in pain and fired after First Aid, who was tugging Ratchet towards the door. First Aid yelled as the blast hit him but kept his footing and his focus.
Barricade leapt up out of the crater Ironhide had blasted him into, claws splayed. Sunstreaker tackled him in midair and the two rolled away, hissing and tearing at each other's wiring. Ironhide shouldered a mech out of the way and ran up on Ratchet's other side, glancing at the deformed gun. "I taught you better than that," he muttered.
Ratchet let out a broken, terrible laugh. "Had to work with what I had," he croaked, shuddering. This close, Ironhide could see where First Aid had linked his systems in with Ratchet's, feeding him energon. Ironhide fired into the advancing Decepticon's with one hand and made a fast link to Ratchet's neck with the other, feeding him a hard, short infusion of energon. Ratchet made a choking sound and Ironhide could almost feel First Aid's reproving glare on the back of his head but Ratchet stood a little straighter, and his systems hummed a little better.
Wheeljack darted between the feet of larger mechs, slapping his EMP bugs against every ankle joint he could reach. The bugs weren't deadly, but they itched like nothing else, and they distorted every electrical system they touched, throwing off motor signals and twisting chameleon mesh into weird colors. Mechs howled and spasmed and dug ugly wounds into themselves, trying to get the bugs out.
A mech caught him by the dorsal armor, hauling him off the ground. Wheeljack swore and bent himself around, straining his second waist as he did but managing to jam a bug right between the mech's fingers. The mech shrieked, but his hand clenched down instead of letting go. Under the noise of struts in extreme duress, he heard a shout, and the pressure released. Wheeljack dropped to the floor in time to see the mech stagger away, his arm neatly severed at the elbow, and Sideswipe hauled him to his feet.
They managed to get outside more or less as a group, but more mechs were joining the fight. They were backed into the mouth of a dead-end alley, holding off the attackers as best they could, but they couldn't keep it up forever. "Got any ideas?" Sideswipe asked no one in particular.
Ironhide grimaced and fired. As the round left his cannon, it grew, erupting into a massive blue-hot fireball - except it didn't. Feedback from the missile informed him it was at exactly the same power it was before. It simply appeared huge, roaring down on their enemies and mechs screamed as it approached them. The round indicated that it struck, throwing back only one of the mechs it seemed to engulf. The rest held their ground for a moment, quizzical. Then two, three, four fell, with holes pierced through their spark chambers. More tumbled, and Ironhide could just barely track something moving through the fading blast aura, something fuzzy and hard to really see but might be a mech. Maybe.
Two mechs dropped down from the building, landing not quite right next to them but close. "Fancy meeting you here," Greenline said to Wheeljack.
"What're you doing here?" Wheeljack demanded.
"Name's Hound," the landlord responded. The other mech picked off an approaching seeker with scary accuracy. "Hologramist. My friend here is either Deadaim or Bluestreak, depending on who you talk to. Mirage is around here, somewhere. We heard your message. Help is on the way."
"Mirage is cutting to the left," Bluestreak said pleasantly, firing an overly long gun into the gang, almost haphazardly. "Making his way around - hold still, you slagger - back towards us. He knows he has to be behind - oh no you don't, stay down, glitch - the blast radius."
"Blast radius?" First Aid asked warily, trying to keep a steadily weakening Ratchet on his feet.
A blurry, indistinct, hard to see mech darted up to them on the left. Bluestreak motioned to Sideswipe to let him approach. The mech solidified slightly, into the cool blue-whites of a priest. "Blaster is incoming," he said.
"Blaster's in far orbit," Wheeljack pointed out. "There's no way he can get here fast enough."
"Jazz brought him into near orbit a few groons ago," the mech that must be Mirage said, with a grim smile. "He thought you all might need a quick get away."
The small breathing room Hound's team bought them closed, a few mechs grabbing others and arranging them into something resembling close ranks. They approached warily, deflecting incoming shots off of their shields. Brawl staggered through the crowd, snarling and heavily injured, and paused at the fore of the murderous group. "Time to die, Autobots," he hissed.
"Not on my watch!" Everyone looked up. A communication's mech was an awe-inspiring sight, with wideswept, radial wings and an imposing gaze. Blaster descended and landed between Isabax and the Autobots, mechs staggering back to avoid his huge feet. The towering red mech rotated his wing arrays down, curling them forward into a nearly perfect parabola around his lower body. Then he screamed.
The intense noise, reflected and amplified by Blaster's wing arrays, bowled mechs over in a wide swath. Others fell to their knees, screaming themselves as their audials imploded and, in a few cases, their internal piping vibrated and burst at resonant frequency. The low sweep of the parabola protected the Autobots from the worst of the noise, though Ratchet nearly fell unconscious, swaying in First Aid's arms. A few who were able to withstand the noise raised their weapons to fire on Blaster, only to be picked off by Bluestreak from between his ankles.
The terrible noise cut off abruptly and Blaster turned, kneeling. "Everyone on board," he ordered, holding out his arms. "Cometary if you can manage it, as small as possible if you can't. Latch on to something or other, or this will be a short flight." They swarmed him, climbing to his shoulders and the wide flanges over his hips, those able to do so transforming into their cometary modes and anchoring to the curved edges of Blaster's armor. Blaster carefully gathered First Aid and Ratchet, still connected to each other, into his arms and rose into the air, his thrusters blistering the armor of the mechs on the ground as he went. As soon as he cleared the nearest buildings he folded and shot off, curving high into the air as he flew towards Tyger Pax.
Towards the closest thing they had to home.
Part 1
o o o
/I have to hand it to you/ Wheeljack sent, leading the way into the club. /You really outdid yourself/
First Aid nodded a distracted thanks. They had gone back down to the holding cell two evenings before, and Wheeljack reactivated the auditory sensors. First Aid completely disabled the twins' pain sensory array and his own hearing, and set to work, fixing up old injuries and making careful modifications. The twins had screamed, long and loud into the night; curses at first, and threats, which turned to pleading and finally wordless, broken noise. The three of them had communicated via carefully controlled tight-beam messages.
First Aid learned that the two had been Autobots who defected very early on, thinking the violent Decepticons more to their tastes. They spent a while in the ranks before deciding that uncontrolled psychopathy wasn't to their liking, and turned again, their attentions directed to sabotage and assassination from within. They were caught, and Megatron made them his own pet fighters in the ruins of the Simfur temple. They had been given to Brawl, one of Megatron's favored glitches, as a gift, and from Brawl to View.
He also learned that the two preferred very up close and personal weaponry, but View had them fitted with gaudy rifles and forbidden them from preferring their blades. Sunstreaker was armed with talons in his hands and feet that could tear through armor like it was gold flake. Sideswipe had singular blades in each arm that nearly doubled his reach. Both had their feet locked into place over their alt-mode wheels, preventing them from using their wheels in their bipedal forms. First Aid removed the restrictive locks and pulled out the mostly-useless cannons at their request.
The empty areas, however, he left open, subtly crimping the energon connections further inside their bodies to prevent a slow drain. The flopping, uncapped energon connections and bared wires appeared to be gruesome, painful wounds, and he affect similar wounds across their bodies. Not a single one was deeper than superficial, and he steadfastly refused to expose any of their truly vital components. Sunstreaker, grinning nastily, suggested he incorporate some of their removed components as a decoration, and Sideswipe wove him a circle of torn wire from both of them. It rested on First Aid's chest like a cadaver, but he wore it anyway. He did not like such a memento. The doctor would.
The mechs in the cells around them, he discovered later, spent the night in sheer terror. The security mechs who monitored the auditory sensors, and the poor mech who went into the cell in the morning to clean the spattered energon off the walls, were deeply disturbed, and already, rumors spread like scraplets. Ironhide and Wheeljack decided to wait an orn before debuting their success in the arenas.
And it worked. Sideswipe and Sunstreaker followed at the doctor's heel, heads down and flinching away from loud noises. Mechs whispered and speculated; the twins usually entered the arenas in null cuffs, snarling at others and fighting their bonds. What had the cruel doctor done to them, to tame them so? Others stared - in horror, in delight, in wonder - at the energon-encrusted gaps in their armor, and murmured about the audial file circulating, where one could hear the two fighters weeping and each begging to end his brother's misery. What had happened in the tiny cell?
Hinge found them a table and the twins arranged themselves at the doctor's feet in ancient poses of slavery and submission. The doctor idly pet Sideswipe's helm as he took stock of the room. Mechs blatantly stared and murmured behind their hands, and the air was thick with tight-beams. All optics were on them.
A mech finally worked up the bravery - or perhaps the level of over-energization, judging by the swaying - necessary to approach them. "Such a waste," he grumbled, rudely poking his finger into the empty space in Sunstreaker's arm. Sunstreaker didn't move. "Can they even fight anymore?"
"They can fight," the doctor replied mildly.
"Right," the mech snorted. He leaned down in Sideswipe's face. "I could knock him over right now, and he's too cowed to even twitch."
"You think that."
The mech straightened just enough to get in the doctor's face instead. "You broke your toys, medic," he sneered softly. "And you let me get too close."
A gun glittered in the mech's hand. Lightning fast, Sideswipe lunged, plunging his blade up and through the mech's chest. Hinge tittered. The doctor smiled and took a sip of high grade that tasted like rusty sludge as the mech choked and shook and died.
Sunstreaker rose and both twins grabbed the corpse, tossing it over the railing down into the pit. They sank back down in tandem, no sign of the violence save the fresh energon dripping down Sideswipe's hand from the blade casing and the quiet, rapid conversations circling the room.
o o o
It took a little under a groon. They never challenged another but let the fights come to them. At the doctor's order - which was really First Aid's quiet plea - each fight was over with as quickly and neatly as the twins could manage. Their popularity surged with each short, vicious battle; First Aid lifted View's idiotic orders on vapid, gaudy displays of power, and the raw killing potential the twins displayed instead was thrilling to the audience, something rarely seen.
A few mechs challenged Stonegrip and occasionally Hinge instead. Those fights rarely lasted any longer. Ironhide was too jaded and battle-forged to indulge in cruelty, and Wheeljack was simply too fast.
When the mech with the overly expensive inlays approached him, First Aid could have wept with relief. Despite never lifting his hand to another, the death of each mech his friends killed weighed heavily on his spark. Their faces haunted him, chasing away recharge, and each night spent cruising between the gaudy, death-fueled clubs was eating away at his sanity.
Ratchet was still out there, somewhere. He couldn't afford to fall, not yet. He leaned on the railing of the pit, watching with an air of boredom as Sunstreaker ripped through a mech's chest. The other mech leaned beside him, a respectful distance away, acutely aware of Stonegrip looming behind them. "I always did like watching those two," he said, almost managing to sound friendly.
The doctor inclined his head slightly. "Oh?"
"Mmm. At Chalak. They used to be Brawl's toys."
"So I've heard."
The mech handed him a strip of achingly blue metal, embossed with the sign of Chalak - an optic ripped from it's setting. First Aid's plating crawled at touching it. "You should come by some night," the mech said, standing again. "I'm sure Brawl'd love to see them again."
o o o
He was finished. As finished as he would ever be. The next time Brawl came for him, he'd be ready.
o o o
Chalak was the worst yet.
The building was a charnel house, with body parts strung from the ceilings in gruesome garlands. Sobbing mechs were chained in the corners with their chest plates peeled back and their sparks exposed, free to anyone for whatever use they wished. The center, like most clubs, was dominated by a broad, sunken pit, but the bodies of the dead were rarely cleared out and the floor was uneven with trampled corpses and slick with old oil. Every fight in Chalak was a fight to the death, with no quarter given and any mech who showed mercy or hesitation was the next victim.
In the center of the audience, with the best seats, was a terrible retinue composed of some of the most vicious, debased Decepticon's in Megatron's entire army. They hollered and cheered on their favored fighters and shared a minibot between themselves, forcing the mech to overload them or mutilating him as they saw fit. The mech shook and wept, and First Aid nearly purged his tanks when he saw the mech's face. His optics had been ripped out and hung over the pit as the night's first energon spilt.
One of them probably had Ratchet.
Their blue ticket got them seats horribly close to the Decepticon retinue. Sideswipe and Sunstreaker assumed their poses of submission, and so close to them, First Aid could feel them shaking in rage. The first few fights passed in a blur of fluids and scraped metal, and not until Stonegrip growled a warning that First Aid realized they had company.
One of the mech's was small, just barely not a minibot, with jet armor and a cruel grin. The other was huge, easily them Prime's mass, though not his height, a blocky brute with enough firepower bristling between armor gaps that he could seriously give Ironhide a run for his credits.
"I told you," the smaller mech spat, waving at the kneeling twins. "It's them. Look at them."
The larger mech bent down, peering curiously from unintelligent optics. "Damn," he muttered. "You're right."
The smaller mech planted his clawed hands on his hips, giving the doctor a frank look. "How in the Pit did you tame them?" he demanded.
Hinge giggled, carving the edge of their table into scallops with a finger transformed into a laser etcher. "The good doctor's really good with his hands," he grinned. "A real miracle worker."
The big mech's facial plates rippled. "A miracle worker?" he asked. "You a medic?"
The doctor toasted the mech with his energon. "No such thing," he said mildly. "Just a mech with an interest in how other mechs work."
"Hn." He peered close at the doctor's face, and no one missed the way Sunstreaker and Sideswipe tensed in warning. "You did a good job with them," he rumbled. "I might show you my own project later. Maybe you can help."
"I look forward to it," the doctor replied, bending his considerable will towards not cringing. The mech smelled like death.
"That's Brawl," Sideswipe hissed after the two Decepticons left. "Despicable bastard."
"Isabax's favored son," Sunstreaker added. "Forged in her own image."
"Be careful," Stonegrip growled, looking directly at the doctor. "Be very careful."
Long breems passed. Mechs died by the score. Sunstreaker and Sideswipe participated in a few of the fights, adding just enough dramatic flare to their kills to satisfy the watching horde. And the Decepticon's toy collapsed.
Sideswipe and Sunstreaker were just starting another fight when it happened. The sightless, broken mech was pinned by the black mech and his spark chamber was being carved into thin slivers of metal by a laser knife when he made a choking, staticy noise and fell into hard recharge. First Aid could not help sending out a scan, and found the mech terribly close to death, hanging on by the thinnest strings. The black mech sneered his disgust and punctured the connection between main energon line and spark chamber with his knife. "Here," he said, shoving the mech towards Brawl. "Another treat for your pet to play with."
Brawl threw the dying mech over his shoulder and stood ponderously. He stomped towards the lift at the back of the club, but paused, looking back. "You wanna see a miracle worker, doctor?"
Miracle worker. Ratchet. Tiny hope bloomed in his spark. "Certainly," the doctor replied, standing to follow.
The mech over Brawl's shoulder was dying in slow waves. First Aid stood just behind him in the lift, looking up at the tiny mech's ruined face. The mech twitched and groaned and spilled energon over Brawl's massive shoulder. He couldn't stand it. What ever Brawl had in mind for the mech, it could be nothing good. Slowly, carefully, he reached up and plugged a single finger into a datajack on the mech's neck. The command he entered was one he swore he'd never use, one rarely taught to anyone but medics working triage. The command killed, with surprising quickness, simply cutting the processor off from the body and spark. It was a back door to provide merciful deaths to mechs such as this, who were doomed to die slow, horribly painful deaths.
The mech stopped twitching. First Aid felt like throwing himself off of the nearest balcony.
Brawl led the way from the lift, down a featureless hall to a featureless door. He swung the mech off his shoulder, then grimaced. "Damn," he muttered. "Barricade went too far." With a shrug, he tossed the dead mech aside and opened the door.
An emancipated, hagard wraith met them. How the mech was still alive, First Aid had no idea. Hunks of armor were torn off, and huge areas of terribly exposed internal piping glinted in the light. The mech's spark chamber glimmered at the seam, the metal bent until it didn't quite shut right. All of the signs of cobalt contamination and brittling disease were evident, along with simple, haunted madness.
It was Ratchet.
First Aid stared, shocked beyond thought. Ratchet, barely clinging to a morbid mockery of life. Ratchet, lifting dead-burning optics as they entered the door. Ratchet, staring at Brawl with pure, unbridled hatred. "It's about time," he rasped. "I've been waiting for you."
Brawl paused. Clearly, this wasn't the norm, and he was uneasy. "Waiting?" he repeated.
"Waiting," Ratchet confirmed. He lifted his arm, and the grating noises his hand made as it transformed would sound right at home downstairs, in the pit. Painfully, his hand became a cannon that thrummed with sick energy, cobbled together with desperation and an amateurs touch. "Waiting a long time," he finished, aiming the cannon at Brawl's spark.
Brawl let out a wheezing laugh. "You really expect to hurt me with that?" he asked. Ratchet didn't answer, letting the charge build. Brawl grinned and threw his arms out. "Go right ahead," he said. "One clear shot, then I'm tearing your head off, miracle worker."
"I'll show you a miracle," Ratchet muttered, and fired.
Green fire filled the world. First Aid dove to the side as the blast ripped through the air, engulfing Brawl and throwing him back through the door and through the wall across the hall. Brawl screamed something, in rage and pain, and disappeared in a pile of rubble. First Aid sat up and nearly wept. Parts of Ratchet's arm were fused in place, and the gun smoked unhealthily. And he was aiming it directly at First Aid now.
"Ratchet," he whispered. "Ratchet, it's me. It's First Aid."
"Liar," Ratchet said dully. "First Aid wouldn't come to a hell like this." The cannon hummed, the energy building again.
First Aid held out his hand, bending his hand back to expose one of his datajacks. "Confirm for yourself," he offered. "I came here to find you, Ratchet. Me, Wheeljack, Ironhide; we came for you." Ratchet stared at him, swaying slightly. "A fuse," First Aid said quietly. "I handed you a fuse, after Wheeljack and Ironhide interfaced you into unconsciousness. It was one of yours, blown; you were furious for a groon but you kept it in your office, on the shelf where you didn't think anyone would noti-"
The charge in the gun dissipated and Ratchet fell to his knees, reaching out to touch him with a trembling hand. "First Aid?" he whispered. "Truly?"
First Aid let out a sob and drew Ratchet into his arms, holding him tightly. Ratchet clung to him, and First Aid sent a hard signal on the Autobot frequency last in use when they left Tyger Pax.
/I found him!/
o o o
The message hit like a speeding megabot. Wheeljack and Ironhide shared a brief, eternal glance over Sunstreaker's head. Ratchet. First Aid had found Ratchet.
Unfortunately, a few of the mechs in the echoing room looked up as well, frowning thoughtfully. They had to get out, and soon.
The time it took First Aid to get back down the lift was forever. He walked out, supporting a broken shell of a mech with a distorted, smoking cannon in place of his left hand. The two sidled towards one of the doors out of Chalak, depending on the attraction of the pit to distract anyone who might-
"Isn't that Brawl's miracle worker?" Barricade asked, red optics spun down suspiciously.
Mechs began to turn towards the fleeing pair. Abruptly, Ironhide stood and followed after them, Wheeljack and the twins close behind. They didn't have long before they were challenged, and the closer he was to them when it happened, the better.
The door to the lift exploded open. Brawl burst from the wreckage with an enraged scream, every weapon primed to fire and bits of his armor oddly charred. He caught sight of Ratchet just as Ratchet lifted the twisted wreckage of his hand and the blast caught a clump of surprised mechs instead of its target. Brawl thundered towards Ratchet with murderous intent, and Ironhide spun his cannons out of their hiding places in his legs, cursing the need to take a tick to reconnect the wiring.
Ratchet's next blast caught Brawl full on, but it was weaker than the previous; the gun was starting to break down. Brawl slammed back and immediately started to rise again, grinning sickly. The Decepticons companions were beginning to rouse themselves, led by Barricade, and Ironhide lifted his cannons and shot Barricade point-blank.
Brawl whipped around, optics flaring at the sight of Ironhide's iconic cannons. "You," he spat, bringing a missile launcher around to bear.
"Me," Ironhide replied grimly, firing at the mechs turning on him. Wheeljack, out of nowhere, landed on Brawl's shoulders and tore the missile launcher off, releasing a few nasty little EMP bugs down into Brawl's armor before leaping to safety. Brawl snarled in pain and fired after First Aid, who was tugging Ratchet towards the door. First Aid yelled as the blast hit him but kept his footing and his focus.
Barricade leapt up out of the crater Ironhide had blasted him into, claws splayed. Sunstreaker tackled him in midair and the two rolled away, hissing and tearing at each other's wiring. Ironhide shouldered a mech out of the way and ran up on Ratchet's other side, glancing at the deformed gun. "I taught you better than that," he muttered.
Ratchet let out a broken, terrible laugh. "Had to work with what I had," he croaked, shuddering. This close, Ironhide could see where First Aid had linked his systems in with Ratchet's, feeding him energon. Ironhide fired into the advancing Decepticon's with one hand and made a fast link to Ratchet's neck with the other, feeding him a hard, short infusion of energon. Ratchet made a choking sound and Ironhide could almost feel First Aid's reproving glare on the back of his head but Ratchet stood a little straighter, and his systems hummed a little better.
Wheeljack darted between the feet of larger mechs, slapping his EMP bugs against every ankle joint he could reach. The bugs weren't deadly, but they itched like nothing else, and they distorted every electrical system they touched, throwing off motor signals and twisting chameleon mesh into weird colors. Mechs howled and spasmed and dug ugly wounds into themselves, trying to get the bugs out.
A mech caught him by the dorsal armor, hauling him off the ground. Wheeljack swore and bent himself around, straining his second waist as he did but managing to jam a bug right between the mech's fingers. The mech shrieked, but his hand clenched down instead of letting go. Under the noise of struts in extreme duress, he heard a shout, and the pressure released. Wheeljack dropped to the floor in time to see the mech stagger away, his arm neatly severed at the elbow, and Sideswipe hauled him to his feet.
They managed to get outside more or less as a group, but more mechs were joining the fight. They were backed into the mouth of a dead-end alley, holding off the attackers as best they could, but they couldn't keep it up forever. "Got any ideas?" Sideswipe asked no one in particular.
Ironhide grimaced and fired. As the round left his cannon, it grew, erupting into a massive blue-hot fireball - except it didn't. Feedback from the missile informed him it was at exactly the same power it was before. It simply appeared huge, roaring down on their enemies and mechs screamed as it approached them. The round indicated that it struck, throwing back only one of the mechs it seemed to engulf. The rest held their ground for a moment, quizzical. Then two, three, four fell, with holes pierced through their spark chambers. More tumbled, and Ironhide could just barely track something moving through the fading blast aura, something fuzzy and hard to really see but might be a mech. Maybe.
Two mechs dropped down from the building, landing not quite right next to them but close. "Fancy meeting you here," Greenline said to Wheeljack.
"What're you doing here?" Wheeljack demanded.
"Name's Hound," the landlord responded. The other mech picked off an approaching seeker with scary accuracy. "Hologramist. My friend here is either Deadaim or Bluestreak, depending on who you talk to. Mirage is around here, somewhere. We heard your message. Help is on the way."
"Mirage is cutting to the left," Bluestreak said pleasantly, firing an overly long gun into the gang, almost haphazardly. "Making his way around - hold still, you slagger - back towards us. He knows he has to be behind - oh no you don't, stay down, glitch - the blast radius."
"Blast radius?" First Aid asked warily, trying to keep a steadily weakening Ratchet on his feet.
A blurry, indistinct, hard to see mech darted up to them on the left. Bluestreak motioned to Sideswipe to let him approach. The mech solidified slightly, into the cool blue-whites of a priest. "Blaster is incoming," he said.
"Blaster's in far orbit," Wheeljack pointed out. "There's no way he can get here fast enough."
"Jazz brought him into near orbit a few groons ago," the mech that must be Mirage said, with a grim smile. "He thought you all might need a quick get away."
The small breathing room Hound's team bought them closed, a few mechs grabbing others and arranging them into something resembling close ranks. They approached warily, deflecting incoming shots off of their shields. Brawl staggered through the crowd, snarling and heavily injured, and paused at the fore of the murderous group. "Time to die, Autobots," he hissed.
"Not on my watch!" Everyone looked up. A communication's mech was an awe-inspiring sight, with wideswept, radial wings and an imposing gaze. Blaster descended and landed between Isabax and the Autobots, mechs staggering back to avoid his huge feet. The towering red mech rotated his wing arrays down, curling them forward into a nearly perfect parabola around his lower body. Then he screamed.
The intense noise, reflected and amplified by Blaster's wing arrays, bowled mechs over in a wide swath. Others fell to their knees, screaming themselves as their audials imploded and, in a few cases, their internal piping vibrated and burst at resonant frequency. The low sweep of the parabola protected the Autobots from the worst of the noise, though Ratchet nearly fell unconscious, swaying in First Aid's arms. A few who were able to withstand the noise raised their weapons to fire on Blaster, only to be picked off by Bluestreak from between his ankles.
The terrible noise cut off abruptly and Blaster turned, kneeling. "Everyone on board," he ordered, holding out his arms. "Cometary if you can manage it, as small as possible if you can't. Latch on to something or other, or this will be a short flight." They swarmed him, climbing to his shoulders and the wide flanges over his hips, those able to do so transforming into their cometary modes and anchoring to the curved edges of Blaster's armor. Blaster carefully gathered First Aid and Ratchet, still connected to each other, into his arms and rose into the air, his thrusters blistering the armor of the mechs on the ground as he went. As soon as he cleared the nearest buildings he folded and shot off, curving high into the air as he flew towards Tyger Pax.
Towards the closest thing they had to home.