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Drift reaches his quarters and manages to stagger to the berth before collapsing, sitting heavily with his face resting in his hands. He’s dizzy, and he knows he needs to figure out why and treat it, but for a moment he lets himself be overwhelmed. We kill cons repeats over and over in his processor, digging into him even through the locked door to his quarters.
There’s a knock. Drift ignores it. He’d sooner flee than have any of the crew see him like this. Plus… we kill cons . There was always the possibility that whoever was on the other side had a bloodlust that hadn’t been satisfied by today’s fight.
“Drift? You okay?”
And like a flick of a switch, wariness turns into shame. He stands to open the door, chastising himself for ignoring Rodimus as a distraction from the pull of his injuries at the movement.
Rodimus had been smiling on the transport down to Temptoria and he’d been smiling on the battlefield as they’d cracked stupid unfunny jokes about their enemies. He isn’t smiling now. “Can I come in?” he asks.
He never asks that. “Of course.”
Drift makes the mistake of turning around to let Rodimus into the room. Rodimus takes a sharp vent. “You’re hurt.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Did you talk to Ratchet?”
“The medics have enough to deal with.”
Rodimus shrinks back at that, as if it’s an accusation. So that’s why he’s here.
“You made the right call today. Yeah, people got hurt, but they’d all volunteered to go. They knew the risks.”
“I know,” says Rodimus. “But people got hurt. Do you have a medkit in here?”
What does he want? Drift is happy to tell him in every language he knows that he’s doing a good job, but he doesn’t know what to do about Rodimus brushing it off. If helping Drift patch his wounds will help him feel better, then Drift will oblige, but something about the situation still feels unsteady, unstable. “Under the berth.”
Rodimus grabs the kit and waits for Drift to sit back down on the berth before positioning himself behind him. Drift knows that it’s because the worst leaking wounds are two lacerations on his back, he knows, but the leftover tension from the battle screams at him for letting Rodimus out of his line of sight. He’s exhausted and keyed up and miserable, and he wishes that just for this moment he could be the kind of person who could be comforted by Rodimus putting a hand on his shoulder to guide him into a better position as he starts to clean off the worst of the wounds with a solvent rag. As is, the contact makes him nauseous. He tries to reassure himself that this it Rodimus, that Rodimus, of all people, wouldn’t hurt him. We kill cons reverberates in his processor.
“I’m sorry about today,” Rodimus says as he pats the solvent dry, prepping the cut for a patch.
“I was joking about the sword thing,” Drift says, after a moment of wondering what Rodimus could possibly have to be sorry for.
“I wasn’t talking about the sword thing.”
Drift can feel Rodimus applying the patch, the firm pressure of his touches more soothing now than it had been when this had started. It’s strange, to have someone else patching him up when he’s not unconscious or stabbed through the spark, but he remembers a time when it wasn’t strange. He and Gasket and the others would always do this sort of thing for each other. Drift finds himself wondering if the Autobots – and this is one of those situations where he doesn’t count – do too.
Rodimus moves on to the second leaking wound and starts again. “I’m sorry about all the…ugliness today. The attitude. The we kill cons chant.” Rodimus says it like it’s nothing and Drift tries to hide his flinch, but with Rodimus’s hands on his plating, he probably fails. “I let everyone – let myself get carried away. I should have stopped it sooner.” Rodimus’s hands smooth down the edges of the second patch, then stop, resting gently on Drift’s back. “I don’t want this ship to be like that. You deserve better.”
Drift can’t speak. It’s as if a dagger’s lodged itself in his intake. He vents fast and shallow.
“Drift?”
It’s occurred to him that Rodimus, despite everything, is here for him . Patching up Drift’s wounds, the apology – it isn’t incidental. It’s why he’s here. What’s he supposed to do with this?
“Drift? You okay?”
He can take it. Rodimus is here to give him a kindness that Drift didn’t ask for and didn’t earn and wants more than anything else right now. Rodimus is here not because he wants to hear Drift say that he’s okay, but because he wants to know the answer. “No.”
“How can I help?” Rodimus’s hands are warm against Drift’s back, steady and still.
“Stay?” It’s all he can think of. At some point over the course of the conversation Drift’s reaction to Rodimus touching him has gone from aversion to a neediness that would ordinarily terrify him. It doesn’t terrify him now, though, because Rodimus is here. Rodimus is offering.
Rodimus wraps his arms around Drift. Drift leans back and allows Rodimus to catch him.