Chapter Text
"Oh man," snorts Groundpounder, "I know that face. Your application got rejected again."
You scowl at him as you clock in with your punch card and shove it back in your subspace. "Don't remind me."
"Don't you think it's time to give up?" he smirks, "They're never going to let a cold constructed piece of slag like you change jobs."
"You're cold constructed, too," you remind him.
"And they'd never let a piece of slag like me change jobs, either!" he laughs, wheezy through fractured vents. You roll your optics at him and turn away.
You check your job list for the day and sigh in frustration. You hate working construction. It's filthy and it's hard and it's menial, and everything you do is in obnoxious isolation. You don't even actually build anything, which might at least feel somewhat validating. All you do is pick things up from the ground and fly them up higher, pick things up from higher places and then fly them down to the ground.
There's better jobs for helicopters, but not for cold constructed ones. You're hard-barred from the Aerial Corps, not that you particularly want to join the Cybertronian military anyway. What you really want to do is medivac- but you know that only forged Cybes get to be a part of the medical system. You don't get to be a doctor, not even medical transport if someone else built you. It isn't done.
You apply for a transfer to Medivac every three months anyway.
You were not a lucky mech. Some of your peers were fortunate enough to be constructed early in the spark splicing program, early enough their existence was considered more of a tolerable novelty than it was by the time you were built six months before Nova Prime left on the Ark and Nominus Prime took over control of Cybertron. By the time you were a decade, the planet was in full apartheid.
Do you resent forged mecha? Obviously. But you're not so stupid as to let them know that; you read After the Ark when it was still legal to own it. You know what happens to people who share such sentiments. You wait on pins and needles for the day you hear the author has had a suspicious and fatal accident.
"Airshock!" calls Landslide, hanging from the structural framework of the skyscraper your team has been working on for the last eight months, "I need another 18-beam up here!"
"Just put it in my carry queue!" you call back, "I've gotta grab another crate of rebar for Takedown first!"
"Oh, come on, it's one beam! It'll take you two kliks!"
"We got a queue for a reason, 'Slide, I ain't gonna be responsible for a collision."
"Didn't I clock in for you last week?" Landslide reminds you, "Do me a favour!"
You grimace internally in your alt and glance over at your rebar delivery on the other side of the site, and then groan and turn to the other direction to grab him an 18-beam from the stockpile with your crane. The day is obscenely hot, the Cybertronian sun beating down and making your plating boil and your fans work overdrive, and tonight you're still going to be thinning your fuel before you top off.
Megatron was right, honestly.
"Hey!" cries a voice you don't have time to recognize, "Airshock, get out of the way!"
You barely have time to look up and see the beam bundle swinging toward you before it hits, and you don't see anything anymore.
You're fragged.
You push the door to your habblock open with your shoulder, limp inside and toss your arm on the table. You don't know what you're going to do.
You were barely scraping by before. Now? Injured, armless, jobless- in need of repair? You're a dead mech walking. You can't work. You can't do anything. You're going to be a guttermech by the end of the week. Your life is over.
There's a knock at your door.
"I am so, so sorry," says Landslide. He looks like he's been crying. "This is all my fault."
"Technically," you sigh, leaning on the doorframe with your one good arm, "...But don't dwell on it. We all get fragged eventually. Could have been anyone's fault. I'm not mad at you. I'm mad at hospital bills, and how they make 'em so I can't afford to get fixed." You spit the last part, bitter. "The system is designed for folk like us to die."
"I know," he says, "Which is why I'm here."
"I'm not taking your money," you say, "I still won't be able to afford the bill and then you'll starve and no one wins. Forget about me."
"That's not it," he says, and lowers his voice to a whisper, "Airshock… I know a guy."
"A guy who does what?"
"A guy who… just trust me. Come with me." He looks nervous.
You eye him suspiciously, but the worst thing that can happen is you get siphoned and stripped for parts and you're just as likely to have that happen anyway. You grab your arm off the table and shut the door. "Okay."
He leads you through the back alleys of Kaon, between ramshackle mechanics and scrapyards and into the lower levels. The darkness blots out the world here and you rely on the dim glow of your headlights to guide you, but it seems like he knows the way through the city's labyrinthian substructure.
Eventually he knocks in a pattern on an old gun-metal grey door, so rusted you aren't even sure it opens.
"In Lower Petrohex I lost my spark," says a chipper voice from within.
"In Praxus gardens I fell apart," Landslide replies. There's a moment of silence and the door swings open, surprisingly easy.
The mech that greets you should not be here. He's gleaming, spotless glossy orange-red and white plating, medic insignia crisp and red. He's got these weird kibble handles on his chest and you wonder what the hell his alt mode is but he smiles at you, optics wide and bright.
"Heya!" he beams, and shuts and locks the door behind the two of you, "Landslide, right? Great to see you again! Is that fuel pump holding up?"
"Sure is, doc," Landslide nods, "It's been awhile. This is one of my coworkers."
"I got hit today," you supply, "Arm's off, tertiary lines damaged, plating's a nightmare. Are you… from Iacon?" He looks like an AoSaT boy, at least, and he nods.
"Sure am. Forged for function'n all!" he leans back against the door coolly and offers you a hand to shake- conspicuously his left, probably since your right is in no condition for shaking. "I'm Hazard."
"I gotta get going," says Landslide, "but trust me, 'Shock, Hazard is safe. He's been out here patching up leakers and guttermechs for months. I hope we meet again."
You watch him leave and you're alone with the AoSaT graduate.
"Why?" you ask him, baffled.
He grins and wags a finger at you, then crosses the room to roll out a hidden medical slab from the wall. "So that's the thing, huh! Everybody asks that. Have you read After the Ark?"
"Yeah," you answer, suspiciously. He's a forged medic. Why in the pit would he read After the Ark? Why would he care?
"I read it," he answers, covering the slab in what looks like parchment paper, "And I'd never seen what things were like out here before, but that book shook me. And then I heard about Ratchet."
You wrack your brain. "The Autobot CMO?" You vaguely remember hearing his name on tv at some point.
"Yes!" Hazard exclaims, pointing at you with both hands, "The Autobot CMO, and I find out he's running a secret underground clinic out in Rodion. He's fixing the world from the bottom up, patching up people out here who don't have anyone else who cares about them, and I say, holy Adaptus, that's the most metal thing I've ever heard. That's a life that matters." His optics glitter as he leans forward on the berth toward you. "If he can do it, I can do it."
"You're insane," you say without thinking. You shouldn't have, but it's true.
He laughs and rolls his eyes. "Aha, maybe a little bit. I figure everyone has to be, but- at the end of the day you have to live with yourself, you know? And I sleep soundly knowing I did something, I tried."
"That's weird," you squint.
"Come on," Hazard pats the berth, "Up with you. I've got an arm to reattach."
"Seriously," you say, without moving, "I can't pay you."
"Good, don't," he smirks, "I work pro bono."
"You're going to get murdered, you know that, right?" you look around at the room, clearly set up as a back alley clinic, medical supplies in old tubes and cups, "The council literally has a hit out on people who do stuff like this. They want to make sure we all stay in our castes."
"I'm not afraid to die," he shakes his head, ever present smile refusing to leave his smug face, "Especially if it's for something."
You eye him suspiciously for another moment, before you step up and onto the medical berth and set your arm down beside you.
"So," he says, pulling on a welding mask, "What's your name, then?"
"Airshock," you say, and wonder why you gave him your real name.
"It's nice to meet you, Airshock," he says, and pulls the mask down, "I'm gonna save your life."