Chapter Text
It had taken a megacycle of recharging with a sparkling between them for either Optimus or Ratchet to bring up Bee’s little predicament. Seven solar cycles of cleaning, mending, and tending to patients for routine physicals, all of which secondary to his true mission that megacycle. Between patients and now-pristine tools, Ratchet had spent much of the first solar cycle attempting to hack into the Iacon information banks.
They had a relatively expansive, very heavily encrypted server of files anyway, courtesy of Alpha Trion’s fondness toward the late Orion Pax. Only four datapads worth of useful files on rearing had slipped through, and Ratchet had read each one, front to back, twice. Not one single piece of new information to do with recharge was in any of them. Exhausted and irate, he’d asked Optimus (very nicely) to at least break the firewall for him.
Within kliks, Optimus had granted him access to every single file in the entire saved database, rendering the several joors he’d spent working through the walls entirely wasted. Already frustrated, his mate’s well-meaning remark of, “Why did you not simply ask?” very much did not help Ratchet’s mood.
There, he found the most recent rearing manuals – with blessedly up-to-date chapters on recharge – from the last few orbital cycles of Cybertron's life, as well as several other very interesting documents from different cultures and species. Another solar cycle had been spent piecing through those, picking out tidbits of useful information among the scrap.
While he was there, he updated two datapads with a couple of medic's journals and an exciting encyclopedia of intergalactic allergens he hadn’t had the chance to get his servos on before they abandoned Cybertron, and a few long novels with tropes he knew Optimus liked back when times were simpler. They might as well have something productive to do, when the cycles got difficult. He had a sinking feeling that they wouldn't be getting much recharge in the process, if the previous cycle’s coolant-filled optics and tense apprehension was anything to go by.
That cycle played over in Ratchet’s helm more than he’d care to admit. It was almost as if the memory of Bee, trying his best to speak around sobs he didn’t know how to control, was burnt into his HUD. He couldn’t close his optics without the image there, staining his processor with the sparkling's pain. Primus, the Allspark must hate him.
It burned deeply all through his frame to know how Bee had stood outside their door for Primus knows how long, trying to build the courage to ask for what he needed. As if they would ever deny him, as if he could. His spark rocketed around his chamber whenever Bee was quiet, if ever he just sat around and did nothing (which was rare). It reminded him of the hurt behind the kit's optics, the simmering fear of rejection that didn't retreat until they led him inside.
Between reading, processing, and doting on his new charge, Ratchet had been slowly piecing together a course of action. What could be done to break the dependency, to slowly and carefully detach Bee from their berth, and in what order? Should he prioritise efficiency, or empathy? What would Bee respond to the best? At all joors of the stellar cycle, he laid online, watching Bee vent and considering new plans, each one calmer, less traumatic, less invasive than the last until finally, he had read and researched and thought enough that he might have the answer.
Every manual from the last vorn before Cybertron’s destruction discussed several different steps to long-term sparkling removal, but more than two had devoted an entire chapter to the same few steps; give them a berth of their own in the same hab as yourselves, then once they were used to their own berth, change the expectation so they could recharge in their own habs. It seemed solid, and there were separate instructions as to strategies to have the sparkling stay in their own hab. Of all that Ratchet had read, this action plan seemed to him to be the most logical, and the least helmache-inducing.
Firmness. Consistency. Love spread throughout, with only a tiny spark of what would feel like cruelty, but inevitably would turn out fine. It was doable.
—-
Like before, it had been Optimus to speak first, this time over their evening ration. The kit sat off to the side, enjoying his mini-cube in distracted silence, watching a group of bots on the other side of the hall rough-house while Jazz barked orders at them.
‘I think we should start phasing Bee out of our berth tonight,’ he said across the bond. Ratchet took a sip of his own energon to hide the way his spark pulsed with aching disagreement at every word. Despite his frame's protest, the medic did not take much convincing; he had known this was coming, prepared for it, even. It would be nice for his work over the last several cycles to mean something. He just wished it didn't have to be so difficult, the emotions boiling under his plating almost to the point of pain.
Optimus and Ratchet kept up the hidden conversation for several kliks, Ratchet sharing all he’d learnt, secretly discussing how it would have to be done. The medic parrotted his research with lead in his tanks, prattling through the best and worst options. Though he tried, Ratchet could not help the guilty looks he threw across the hall every so often, desperately wishing they didn’t have to disrupt such a large, obviously very stressful part of Bee's life.
It couldn’t be done too fast; both bots unanimously agreed that there was no chance that would go down well with the kit. They couldn’t break a vorn and a half’s worth of conditioning in one cycle. No, it would need to be slow, covert, unassuming, though Ratchet had the awful, stirring feeling in his tanks that this would be a terrible, recharge-less disaster regardless of how it was intended. Optimus smiled and nodded in submissive acceptance when Ratchet mentioned the datapads, silently agreeing that, yes, I too believe that this will not be easy for any of us.
As long as they stood together and worked as a team, they could do it. They had practice, after all. Thankfully, the war had hit a lull, a slow patch that graciously allowed them to devote as much attention (and time online) as needed to the sparkling. Unfortunately, silence also usually meant a torrential storm was brewing under Megatron's pedes, but for the klik at hand, it could be ignored.
When the joor rolled around that they had been sending Bee – and by extension, themselves – to berth, Optimus and Ratchet led the kit into their hab. The door closed behind them with a soft snik, and the two elders watched Bee retrieve his blanket from the shelf it was kept on during the day and make for the berth. It was as if the conjunxes had both decided to cease venting simultaneously, both watching the other as if in competition, waiting for somebot to speak. Standing together in the middle of the room, waiting, watching, holding each other accountable. They had a loose script for how the evening should play out, but both knew it could go right off the portside in less than a nanoklik.
It was Bee climbing into the berth, making himself comfortable in the centre and looking expectantly out at them that had stopped their wordless battle. Ratchet, with every ounce of courage he had spent joors mustering up, spoke. He reached down to take Optimus’ servo in his, processor clinging to the comforting squeeze he received in return.
“Actually, kit, we’re going to try something new this cycle,” he said, the words coming easier than he had expected. He’d thought he would have to force them out of his intake like bullets, each one burning with force that ripped holes in his plating. Instead, they fell of their own volition. There was time yet, but the current ease served as proof that he could do this. He could do this.
“Okay,” Bee responded, a flicker of excitement in his optics that Ratchet hated to douse. He moved the covers to the side and got up out of the berth, getting to his pedes in front of the conjunxes. “Like what?”
Ratchet continued, while he still had enough confidence. “Did you notice anything different about the hab when you came in?”
Bee's helm whipped erratically from side to side, searching for the different that would undoubtedly ruin his stellar cycle. Ratchet watched his field dampen as his optics fell onto the sparkling-sized berth tucked into the corner of the hab. It hadn’t taken much work to detach the kit’s berth from the next room and transfer it into the larger hab, but it had left Bee’s hab with an expansive, unplaceable feeling that Ratchet didn’t appreciate one bit. In tandem, it gave their hab more warmth and fullness than it’d had in vorns. Even with the kit’s blanket and other little trinkets he’d scrounged around the ship, on display in cleared-out shelves, his presence hadn’t truly felt real until this moment, staring at a sparkling berth that somehow fit perfectly into their hab.
Bee’s gaze lingered on the berth for a nanoklik or two as he processed what it meant, and then looked back at the pair. Ratchet couldn’t quite decipher the look he received; it appeared nervous, an ounce of betrayal then mixed with upset, all thrown into an expression that was slightly too large for Bee's faceplate.
“We know that recharge is a sensitive subject for you, bitlet,” Optimus began, putting his servos on his hip struts to assert just a little bit of authority while keeping his frame and field open, “but you cannot sleep in our berth forever. I think you know that.”
Bee's optics widened, desperation written all over his faceplate. “But I– my carrier, I–”
“Yes, sweetspark, we know you recharged with your carrier,” Ratchet interrupted, but only after his vocoder found the softness it needed to keep firm, but kind. “And that means something. I'm sure you have lots of really wonderful memories tucked away in your databanks, don't you?”
Bee nodded, his frown lifting slightly. Vorns later, reminiscing on these cycles, Bee would confess that he did have beautiful memories of his carrier; sometimes when he laid in berth with Optimus and Ratchet, wispy visages of his carrier would play on his HUD, the sound of her vocoder humming softly in his audials as she watched him fall into recharge. Even if it hurt, and hit his spark with misplaced guilt at times, he loved the stellar cycles he could see her again. At that very klik, though, standing in Optimus and Ratchet’s hab, about to be ousted from their berth, Bee could not bring himself to explain.
“Right. I promise you, Bee, you'll never forget the special connection you had with your carrier, and I’m sure you want to keep making those same memories with us. However, Optimus and I are a little different, a little older, and our frames are a lot bigger than your carrier. Not to mention there are two of us,” Ratchet explained with as much compassion as he could, giving Bee a little smile that he hoped signalled safety. “It's not safe to recharge in the same berth when we're so big, and you're so small. I know I can't recharge properly knowing I might roll my big aft over and squish you in the middle of the cycle.”
Bee seemed to consider that, his optics flicking between Optimus and Ratchet as if he could find a disparity between them.
“It's not safe?” He repeated, testing the words on his glossa as if their meanings might change coming out of his intake.
“Exactly, sparkling,” Optimus agreed, offering his empty servo for Bee to take. The kit tentatively raised his own servo and gave it to Optimus, who led both Bee and Ratchet over to the berth in the corner.
“We think it’s best if you recharge in your own berth,” continued the Prime, kneeling to be faceplate-level with the sparkling. “Not because we do not want you to berth with us, never because we don’t want you, Bee. That is for certain. We must recharge separately because we do not want you to get hurt. Do you understand?”
Bee nodded morosely, his field frustrated and wary of the change, despite its logic. The sparkling pressed forward independent of the older bots, and pressed one servo into the soft berth the Autobots had made for him cycles ago. His hesitancy was met with assurance at his back, Optimus’ large servo hovering close to keep him from falling as he climbed up. If it were there for any other reason, well. Ratchet wouldn’t say anything.
Bee hadn’t done much since Optimus had spoken, but both caretakers were made to know exactly how he felt about the whole affair by what leaked through his field. It was bitterness, and confusion, and frustration, and more than anything, abandonment. The last coiled around the others like vines, squeezing around each negative swirl and totally snuffing any semblance of safety or contentment.
Optimus turned to look at his conjunx; for once in his existence, the Prime found himself unable to figure out exactly how to mend a situation, to solve the problem and save the day. It seemed that the totally unsettled, but not outwardly reactive aura of the sparkling had disarmed him, and Ratchet felt much the same way. He'd expected screaming, sobbing, begging, for all of those big, terrible emotions to rip out of the sparkling's frame like fireworks. Instead, they'd been met with an obviously upset, yet deadly silent kit.
Though small, a shred of doubt crept past his earlier confidence. Even just that sliver of fear was almost enough to make Ratchet throw his shaky plan out the window; the only force stopping him from taking Bee into his arms and pulling him right back into their berth was the knowledge that Optimus would be so very disappointed in him. No, he couldn’t allow himself to break, not now and not ever. For Bee's sake, and his own.
“We'll just be over here, sparkling,” Optimus said, his smile audible and assuring, though his field betrayed much of his own disquiet. “You can still see us, and hear us, and feel our fields. You will be alright.”
Bee's troubled expression only deepened; his optics fell to Ratchet for confirmation, who, upon attempting to respond, found that his intake didn't seem to be functional anymore. So, in lieu of further discussing the pros and cons of sleeping in a berth without the kit, he just copied Optimus’ reassuring smile, nodded, and tried to pretend it wasn’t the same look he gave to badly wounded patients.
Optimus took a long step backwards, toward their berth. “Have you got your blanket?”
Ratchet’s chassis tightened as he watched Bee almost decide to reach for him, pitching forward as if to follow, but aborting the movement at the last nanoklik. Instead, the sparkling nodded spitefully; he had been holding the little black square tightly at his side for most of the conversation, and only further hardened his grip on the poor thing at its mention.
It was at this point that Ratchet realised that Bee had not said a word in several kliks. He hoped that the verbal shutdown was a product of the situation and not a response to a deeper trauma, or worse. He couldn't handle the knowledge that he had caused more trauma for the poor kit, regardless of how such a thing came about.
“Alright, then. We will be right over here. Goodnight, B-127,” Optimus told him; told him, with an air of unquestionable finality that Ratchet would never have been able to muster. The medic gave his own goodnight with his servos clenched into fists, hidden from the sparkling but necessary to force the words from his intake with any kind of love behind them. Softness felt like a lie now, for what he was doing, for what they'd already done. Optimus motioned for Ratchet to do the final send off, get the kit comfortable and give him a proper evening farewell, but the medic didn’t even notice. Guilt and shame washed through him at the realisation that, if Optimus were not here, he very much could not fix this.
He’d never have been strong enough to withstand the devastated optics on the other side of the hab and leave Bee alone. One of many reasons that the Matrix had chosen Optimus, after all, was his perseverance. Ratchet didn’t have the slagging willpower to so much as say no to Bee, let alone deny him security and comfort during a period of such fragility. Primus, he could be such a good caretaker, and he wasn’t. He was failing at even the simplest task, and it was destroying him from the inside out.
That was something he’d have to force out of himself as soon as possible. His habit of letting himself have whatever he wanted with the mentality of deal with it later had to be broken, or else he’d wreck any progress they made with Bee in nanokliks. The way he'd need to present himself to the kit was just… tough love. It wasn’t like they made him recharge outside, for Primus’ sake. They needed to nip this behaviour in the bud, it was all for his own good. Recharging wasn’t something that just went away, and if they let Bee continue needing caretakers nearby to be able to recharge, it would fester and morph into a much bigger problem that would be much harder to solve.
They were phasing him out of the berth at the best time, and doing it the best way. Primus knew how much slagging research he’d done, he knew that keeping Bee at arms length, allowing him to stay in the hab without laying in their fields was the least intrusive form of getting him out of their berth.
All of that was good in theory, but only the Allspark knew how terrible it truly was, seeing his sparkling in any sort of pain. Since the klik Optimus had claimed Bee as theirs, the caretaker – faux carrier – coding in his spark had gone absolutely haywire, force-starting anxious medic protocols at all joors of the solar and stellar cycles to make sure he was doing a good enough job at keeping his clearly, visibly healthy kit online. He’d never had such a short nervous fuse in his whole existence, not even around the first newspark.
The difference, Ratchet knew, was that Bee was his. No bot outside of Optimus had laid claim to the sparkling, which left Ratchet free to take exactly what he’d wanted all along, what he’d dreamed and begged for. The betrayal in Bee’s field told Ratchet exactly what he needed to know; that he’d failed. That Bee had loved him, even just for a single nanoklik, and now the trust had been broken. He’d shattered his unspoken promise of unwavering, unconditional love and comfort, and stripped the one thing that helped the sparkling feel secure.
“Ratchet.”
Bee’s resentment must be another punishment. It was some kind of test, it had to be. Primus– or, whatever the frag evil slagger in the sky had cursed him to a sparklingless existence, where he was to live out his days alone, mourning the life he could have had if he weren’t so...
So…
Frag. Frag it all, he thought bitterly. He was so useless, he couldn’t even come up with an apt insult to contribute to his spiral of self loathing. Primus, give me strength.
“Ratchet,” the same silken voice repeated, though he had gone unheard the first time. It was the sensation of warm servos pressed against his faceplate to pull him back in from his processor, snapping his helm up from where its attention had drifted to the floor. His optics found a faceplate that was definitively Optimus’, but undefined, staticky. It was that sight that forced the coolant welling in his optical ducts to spill over, tracking unbecoming lines of wetness across his plating.
Immediately, his frame flooded with shame, and he tried to pull Optimus’ servos away from his helm so he could destroy the evidence of his unrest as quickly as possible. Much to his chagrin, Optimus did not allow him to hide, and pulled Ratchet into his arms, pressing their spark chambers together to force the medic away from whatever terrible thought plagued him. There, Ratchet spent several nanokliks forcing his vents to return to a normal rhythm, finding that somewhere between putting Bee to berth and now, his fans had kicked into overdrive and he’d been venting dangerously for an unknown length of time. How long had it been since they’d started getting Bee down, and how long had he been like this?
As air began to once again cycle his frame, awareness returned too. His field, instinctually pulled tight to his frame for protection, slowly unfurled and crept into the hab. Inside of it, he could feel Optimus’ concern, though all of this was nothing truly new. He’d had incidents before, though usually alone. It was not the sort of thing he troubled his conjunx with often, but when certain needs had to be met, he would seek comfort in the mech. Optimus knew what all of this meant, and how to calm him. Even just his field’s reminder that Optimus was there helped soothe away what was left of this… episode.
‘I apologise, Ratchet, I was too distracted to notice you sooner. Are you alright, dearest?’ Optimus asked across the bond, pressing his forehelm to Ratchet’s to comfort both his conjunx, and himself. The Prime’s worry slowly ebbed from his field as Ratchet became more and more responsive, though did not fully dissipate.
‘Yes, I’m fine, I’m fine. You did well. Thank you, sweetspark,’ Ratchet hummed in return, though the last dregs of panic still prickled his servos with excess energy. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t handle myself better-’
An almost inaudible whimper from somewhere below him pulled him the last stretch back to reality. Something was stuck to his tibulen, something small and warm and leaving another wet patch on his plating. He looked past the coverage of Optimus’ arms to find Bee, clinging to his leg as if his spark depended on it. Sensing his movement, the sparkling began to cry harder, murmuring under his breath.
Please don't go. I'm sorry, I'll be good, I promise, please.
If Ratchet's base coding knew anything, it was how deeply he loved sparklings. This sparkling in particular, Primus above, he's never loved anything quite as dearly as this yellow ball of energy. He wanted to open his intake and let every thought he's ever had about his sparkling tumble out, every time in the last two megacycles that he'd caught himself wondering what life would look like for them one, two, five deca-cycles later, every sideways glance he'd stolen at the kit while he played with the younger scouts, and sometimes Jazz, once scores had been settled.
Bee didn't know how desperately he'd wanted to throttle the Autobot second in command the night they found him, and how he would have allowed himself to, if Jazz had left so much as a paint scratch on the kit. He didn't know that every second Ratchet was away from him was spent with him on his processor, wondering what he was doing, if he'd hurt himself running around the ship yet, when he'd next get to see the kit.
Seeing Bee's coolant-filled optics was like having his frame torn to pieces by rabid predacons, made worse still by the fact that all evidence pointed to the conclusion that he was the cause of this particular bout of tears. He caught Optimus’ optics, which shone with the knowing glint he'd hoped he'd find there. The Prime released him with a nod, and he immediately dropped to his knee-struts, dragging Bee into his chassis. He was leaning his weight on the backs of his tibulen in a way that would make his joints ache, but he barely registered the pain. His field invaded Bee’s in earnest, squeezing around his sparkling until they were entwined in apology, in forgiveness and peace. Slowly, caretaker and kit came together independent of their fields, and calmed each other to a point of almost normalcy. It took full nanokliks of trying with his whole spark, but Ratchet managed to speak.
“Oh, Bee, I really am so sorry,” he said low in his vocoder, resting the heel of his palm on Bee’s cheek, stroking the plating beneath his digits to clear the wet streaks from his faceplate. The irony of such a situation was not lost on him, but he had fixed the issue then, and he would fix this one too. Bee leaned into his servo, and that alone almost fogged Ratchet’s optics back up. It was reinforcement, at the very least, that his processor was not always correct.
“Don’t go,” the kit whispered, his vents shaking with unshed sobs, the plea barely louder than the whirr of his vents. “Please, don’t leave. Please.”
“I won’t,” Ratchet held him tighter, to the point he was sure his grip might have stung. “I promise you, sweetspark, I’m not going anywhere. I won’t ever leave you. I will always be here.”
“What happened? What was that?” He demanded, and the desperation crawling out of his vocoder was almost enough to make Ratchet want to tell him the truth. Almost. Unfortunately, in the absence of truth, one must act convincingly enough to sell whatever they’ve made up.
“Some old bots just like to recharge standing up sometimes.”
He'd blurted the first excuse he found in his processor, but really? What bot wanted to recharge on his pedes? Would he end up having to do that to keep up the lie? Oh, Primus above, what was he doing?
“I’ve never heard of that,” Bee’s surprise, though probably genuine, sounded far too much like an accusation for Ratchet’s liking. To be fair to him, the kit wasn’t stupid; a frame in an instinctual state of panic surely didn’t look like recharging. For this cycle, though, he would just have to pretend to believe him. For all of their sakes.
“Well, now you have,” he retorted, “but seeing something like that for the first time, I’m sure I must have scared you, sparkling. I never meant to upset you.”
“It’s okay,” Bee conceded with a wet shrug, though his field and faceplate both held much less stress than before. “I wasn’t that scared.”
Huh. His sparkling was just about as bad at lying as he was. He chuffed, shaking his helm fondly at the thought, though the resemblance was simply happenstance.
“I’m sure you weren’t. Either way, we’re all fine, aren’t we? No broken struts?” He asked him light-sparkedly, watching the sparkling turn that over in his helm. Finally, Bee shook his head, wearing a small smile and looking at him through dry optics. “All’s well, then, isn’t it?”
Truthfully, all was not well. Really, what had been going through his processor to think letting himself get that bad right in front of Bee was alright? What possessed him to allow that? It was more than fine to work himself into a state in the privacy of his medbay, or behind one of the cubicle doors in the washracks, but not near someone so fragile, so naive. The purest, sweetest kit their race had ever seen might subconsciously learn his habits, Primus forbid.
A drip of insistence pulsed down his back. Ratchet turned to find Optimus’ field prodding him for his attention. Chronometer, it reminded him. He checked his internals on his HUD and found that it had been twenty-seven kliks since they had first entered the hab. It had felt much longer; if it had told him it had been several joors, he’d have believed you without question. Emotional whiplash’ll do that to a bot, I suppose.
He cleared his vocoder, and took to his pedes. “Right, then, Primus. It’s late, now, isn’t it? Much too late for sparklings to be awake.”
“Yes, I agree,” Optimus found his vocoder from where he’d melted into the background. “I think we have all had more than enough excitement for one cycle, and I’m sure Ratchet would very much like to retire.”
Ratchet would truly never be able to thank his conjunx enough for seemingly always knowing exactly the right thing to do for him. The adrenaline had run dry of his systems and the reality of the stellar cycle had finally settled in and by Primus, all Ratchet wanted was to collapse into berth and recharge until the next vorn.
“Yes, that's quite right. Time for berth, bitlet, come on,” Ratchet held a servo our toward the sparkling’s berth, less an invitation and more an instruction. In return, Bee gave him a look of incredulous disappointment that clearly read, Really? After all of this, we’re still doing that?
If he faltered now, he was sure Optimus would understand. If he faltered now, he’d just find excuse after excuse to keep postponing it. Funnily enough, losing control had almost rectified most of his apprehension. He put on his best stern medic voice and doubled down. “Yes, Bee, come on. I know it’s scary, but it’s necessary.”
An idea struck his processor and before he knew it, he was moving. He and Optimus purposefully hadn’t bolted the berth to the ground on the proviso that it would be moving back to its rightful place in no time, so it wasn’t terribly difficult to pull it a few feet to the right. Bee watched him as he went with curiosity branching out through his field. In the new arrangement of the hab, Bee’s berth was positioned only an arm’s length from the caretakers’.
“There we go. Compromise,” Ratchet said firmly, brushing off his servos and planting them on his hip struts. “You don’t want to sleep in your own berth, and I don’t want you to recharge so far away from me. I’ve fixed at least one of those issues, now, come on, don’t fuss. In the berth with you.”
Though his faceplate told him exactly what he thought of such a thing, there was less hesitance this time as Bee clambered onto his own berth and got beneath the covers. Ratchet fretted with his tarps for a few nanokliks, retrieving Bee’s little black blanket from where it had been discarded on the floor of the hab, and placed it in the berth with him.
“Goodnight, Bee,” Ratchet said, this time freely, with soft servos smoothing blankets around his kit. “We will see you in the morning, alright?”
“See you in the morning,” Bee parroted, still not quite meeting Ratchet’s optic. Though, he was subdued, less combative this time around. It felt like an acquittal, much welcomed.
With that, Ratchet turned his back, and got into his own berth without much more fanfare. Optimus, who had been standing off to the side as if waiting for permission to move, followed him beneath the covers. They ended up laying on their sides, facing each other, just watching each other settle in exhausted awe. How on Cybertron had the first cycle of their plan gone this badly? They’d prepared for hiccups, of course, but this, this was laughable!
‘What’s that look for?’ Ratchet asked, regarding the indescribable expression on his mate’s faceplate. He didn’t expect judgement out of his conjunx, but the rate he’d been going this cycle, his behaviour deserved at least some explaining. He wished Optimus would just ask, though-
‘Nothing. I am simply so proud of you, dearest,’ Optimus replied lowly, his optics gentle and full of admiration.
Ratchet rolled onto his backplate to hide before his optical ducts could fill again, and sighed. ‘Puh-lease. Save your sappy slag for the morning, fool.’