Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Stolen Kiss

It happened earlier than you might think. Long before you became lovers, anyway. Before your adventure in the desert. Not long after Delphi, in fact. And it was so strange and spontaneous that you didn’t know what to do with it other than play it over, again and again, as you lay stunned and alone in in your habsuite that night.

Even the memory resists interrogation: why was he at Swerve’s that night? The place was packed and intensely loud. Not that you minded; you always loved a crowded bar, the happy clamour of people forgetting their cares. It made you nostalgic for the war. He on the other hand usually eschewed scenes like this, being aloof and not much of a drinker, and unburdened, as far as you knew, by nostalgia of any sort. When he appeared at your elbow it as was if by magic, like he’d materialized out of stray atoms in the air. No swords. Probably half a dozen knives, of course, hidden here and there; the kid clacked like a cutlery drawer when he walked. But he looked relaxed, easy in his skin, more carefree than you could ever remember seeing him. Memory is a funny thing. He was carrying a terrible secret then, and it was eating him alive.

You’d already been there an hour and were at the sweet spot in your second drink when life’s edges begin to soften and everything swells with goodwill and free association. You were at the point when you wanted to say exactly – exactly – what you were thinking, which was that he was as beautiful as the moon over water. You remember that, how many years ago was that, the last time you saw beauty. How you nearly crashed on the meridian when you saw it. Instead you made a joke about the noise – the music really was loud – and Drift, who couldn’t hear you, shook his head and smiled so bewitchingly that you grinned back like an idiot, transfixed. It was a bit pathetic, how good a smile like that could make you feel, but you couldn’t help it, and you began to think of ways you could keep that smile on his face, stop it from slipping away, stop him from retreating back into his secret world and leaving you by yourself, alone, again, at the bar. You would have slurred if you’d said that thing about the moon, anyway.

He seemed to want to tell you something that he didn’t want shouted, so he leaned forward, beckoning, as if to speak in your ear. And you, in your compliant state, leaned obligingly toward him, preparing to hear about the colour of music or whatever crackpot thing he was going to get you with this time. You remember the brush of him against your cheek, and his smell: smoke and carbon steel, and under that, his own sweetness, something dark and feral that went straight to your groin. Hot exhalations on your ear. If Drift was going to say something, he was taking his sweet time, and eventually you turned your head questioningly toward him, just as Drift was turning his. Your noses bumped, and your lips brushed, met, stilled. Softness on softness. It was several long seconds before Drift drew back to raise his fingers to his lips where your mouths had opened to each other. Then he grabbed your drink, downed it in one swallow, apologized, and bought you another.

Two weeks later you walked him to the shuttle and thrust a first aid kit into his hands. Take this, you’ll need it. Your private number, you gave that too. He kept looking to the side like he was seeing something that wasn’t there. The pipe that hit his head — there hadn’t been time to check the injury — but he seemed to shrug it off as you put your hand out to his shoulder to shield him from the jeering crowd. He was fit to travel and you couldn’t follow him. Years later he’d tell you how Deadlock had been waiting for him when he’d gotten on that shuttle, how he’d been sitting in the copilot’s seat and turned to smile knowingly when Drift sat down and took the controls. A concussion. A kiss. They opened the shuttle bay doors and he dropped down into the night.

Chapter Text

First Aid didn’t have Ratchet’s touch. Why did Drift expect him to? Because the apprentice had surpassed the master in so many other ways? He was good. In fact, he was the best. Ferociously intelligent, asked all the right questions, took risks guided by a clinical intuition that was both courageous and wise. And he listened, which Drift appreciated. Not many people listened to him, even now.

But he didn’t have Ratty’s light hands. Nobody did. Nor did he have Ratty’s way of getting the worst over with before you even noticed he’d started. Or his clever trick of tweaking a wire to distract you when he knew something would hurt. Nobody could anticipate pain the way Ratty did and head it off at the pass. When First Aid clicked Drift’s new ankle joint into place, Drift winced.

“Sorry.”

It wasn’t Aid’s fault. It was Drift’s for letting himself be spoiled by Ratchet’s care. And Ratchet’s for never insisting that he have another physician. Drift’s final frame: that was Ratchet’s labour. When they became lovers, when they married, when they settled down to live out their days together -- all though that time, Ratchet continued to perform Drift’s repairs. It wasn’t proper; they both knew that. But it became one of their deepest intimacies. Nobody knew Drift’s body like Ratchet did. And nobody had the nerve to tell Ratchet he shouldn’t be the one to look after it, nor to tell Drift he couldn’t have his choice of doctor.

When Ratchet was dying, he had done two things. First he’d approached Ultra Magnus to help him draft a will so ironclad it would withstand any assault on Drift’s claim to their shared property. And then he’d approached First Aid and asked him to take over Drift’s medical portfolio. It was the only time Aid ever saw Ratchet weep.

It was also the first time he saw, in writing, how old Drift was.

Aid finished the adjustments to Drift’s ankle and went into the next room to consult the readouts from his scans. They were in the process of relocating Drift’s front wheels, which were at his feet; Drift had been feeling their weight more and more and wondered if they might be better situated closer to his core. The backwards vault of his transformation sequence was straining him too, but that was something they’d tackle when they overhauled his magnetics. One thing after another. Was it because he no longer had Ratty that he felt so decrepit? Or had Ratty’s death simply come at a time when he was entering a new life phase— the one where everything stopped working as it should? “Just look at me, kid,” Ratchet loved to say, as both a warning and a joke.

It was while Drift was waiting for First Aid to return that he spotted it. Right there, next to the slab, with the pressure gauges and multimeters and the other diagnostic equipment. Sitting so innocently with its lights off and its sensory arm crooked downward and off to one side. Had he ever learned its proper name? Ratchet had probably told him at one point, but since it was the subject of an argument between them, Drift had made a point not to listen. He’d called it the death clock and had hated it more violently than he’d hated any sentient machine. He couldn’t help it. It was the certainty of its knowledge that he found so obscene: the way it put the end of Ratchet’s life on the calendar as if it were a holiday, or the date of an appointment. It didn’t occur to him then that Ratchet, who already knew he was dying, was only using it to decide how best to spend the time he had left.

It was only an instrument. That’s what Ratty had said. It even had a switch labeled on/off-- Drift reached out and flicked it without even thinking, and its soft orange light brightened and hummed. It looked gentle enough. Was it so terrible? Was it so terrible to know?

The light tingled a bit when he put his hand under it, but what startled him was the counter flashing, its digits scrambling as it calculated his numbers. Drift willed himself to say calm. Say it: I am old, there won’t be much time left. It wasn’t so hard to accept. He’d felt so tired lately. His wheels were heavy and it hurt to transform. Time spilled out across the slab. Mederi had scrambled so many of the certainties he held about the Afterspark, but he still believed Ratchet would be waiting for him when the time came. The thought pierced him with a deep, sweet ache. Ratty!

The digits settled. Drift cocked his head, then cocked it the other way. This couldn’t be right. They were telling him his age; he knew that already.

No: the counter was going backwards. It was counting down. It wasn’t telling him how many years he’d lived; it was telling him how many he had left. The numbers were exactly the same.

Drift switched off the death clock and sat very quietly on the slab, waiting for First Aid to get back with the results about his wheels. When that matter was resolved, they’d move on to magnetics and Drift’s transformation sequence. He was old. Ratty had maintained him so lovingly and with such skill.

He was exactly halfway through his life.

Chapter Text

It was late in the evening when the call came through, and Ratchet ought to have been asleep. He wasn’t on duty and he wasn’t on call. Good sleep, regular sleep: that was what he needed, that was what everyone told him to get. He wasn’t technically on leave – the thought made him laugh – but Pax had strongly hinted that if he showed any sign of doing anything other than resting for the next couple of weeks, there’d be trouble. Ratchet knew there was no use in explaining that trouble was what happened when he did nothing but rest.

And sleep… well, sleep terrified him.

He snatched his phone from the bedside table with an eagerness that embarrassed him and stared in confusion at its dark, inert screen. The ringtone persisted. It wasn’t his phone. It was… more distant. Muffled.

Realization came slowly, hobbled by a suspicion that he was asleep, and this was another of those dreams from which he’d awake bereft and sick with longing.

Not a dream. He flipped back the covers and swung his legs to the floor, wincing as he did so. Not too fast. He couldn’t help it. He raced toward his desk like a kid to the tree on Christmas morning. It wasn’t in the top drawer. Nor the next. Sometimes he wondered if he hid the damn thing so perversely in order to forget it existed. As if he didn’t charge it up every week and check it hopefully for messages.

It must have been on its twentieth ring by the time he uncovered the second phone. To his ears, there was something teasing in its persistence, something playful and knowing. There was also, if he wanted to hear it, a little bit of a threat: the kind that made his stomach lurch and the blood rush unbidden to his groin. Come on, Doc. I know you’re home. He could hear the white curve of that smile.

He didn’t recognize the number on the display. He never did; it was never the same. Always a moment of pure terror when he answered it, that the voice on the other end wouldn’t be the one he expected. The game was up, they knew where he lived.

And him? Oh, him, he’s dead.

Ratchet accepted the call and held the phone to his ear. The voice on the other end, when it came, said the same thing it always did.

“Are you alone?”

Relief and dark excitement. Those were the ingredients of a swoon.

“Yeah, I’m alone.”

“Are you at home?”

“Yeah.” Ratchet was smiling like an idiot, twirling slowly on the spot like a teenage girl. If the phone had a cord he’d be wrapped in it; he wanted to be wrapped in it, wrapped in that voice; caught like a fish. It had been months since the last call and he’d thought it was over, the light gone out, that they were truly now in the age of lead. To think how easy it had been once, that not so long ago are you home meant can I come over. The kid slipping in with his own key in the middle of the night, clatter of his guns hitting the floor. His feet were always cold when he got into bed. Ratchet could tell by his smell and feel and the way he tasted if he was exhausted, if he’d been in a fight. They rarely turned on the light.

Ever since the incident at the DMF, Ratchet’s building had been crawling with security.

The voice quieter now, a shade darker. “Are you okay?”

Ratchet sat down on the edge of the bed. There were things he couldn’t tell him just as there were things he couldn’t ask. “I’ve been better.”

“Were you asleep?” The question sounded hopeful, like he wanted to imagine Ratchet that way.

“Nope,” Ratchet grunted as he leaned back on the bed. He wanted to steer the subject away from him. “You neither, I’m guessing.”

A soft laugh down the line, followed by a cough. He sounded smoky, a little stoned. “You know me.” Ratchet did. In the hours they spent together, most of them at night, how many had the kid slept through? Every time Ratchet woke, he’d find him sitting up and smoking, face illuminated by the unfathomable contents of his phone. Sometimes he’d be looking at Ratchet and would reach out and stroke his hair. Go back to sleep, Doc.

Ratchet lay down, drew the covers over him, held the phone to his ear. “Are you ok?”

A long silence. A rustle on the line that might have been static, or a sigh. “I’ve been better.” Sad smile Ratchet could hear in the voice. “Stay on the line for a bit?”

Ratchet drew a pillow close to him and clutched it like a lover. It smelled like the rest of his bed, of course, but if he tried hard enough he could remember: smoke, sweat, sex, metal. The vulnerable scent of his unwashed hair. It wasn’t the first time they’d done this, holding each other over the space that separated them. “Of course.”

Where are you? Are you taking care of yourself?

Who have you killed?

The line was quiet for a while, just a suggestion of breathing carried over the space between them. Against his will Ratchet could feel the tug of sleep. He needed it, felt he could have it now, so long as the line stayed open and he could hear those soft breaths in his ear.

I was tortured.

“Doc.” His voice like the voice in a dream. “Do you still have the ring?”

He meant the small signet he’d slipped onto Ratchet’s little finger at Christmas. It had been snowing; there were beads of water on his black eyelashes. He’d said, don’t worry, it doesn’t mean we’re engaged or anything, and then turned bright red. They'd taken it off when they brought him into the hospital after the incident. Ratchet had been terrified they’d see the two letters engraved there and ask what they meant. All the things that had happened, and that was what he was scared for.

“Remember. Just tell them it stands for ‘doctor.’”

Ratchet smiled into the pillow. "I miss you, kid."

"Ratchet?" That smoky voice coming down with him now into his dream. He'd take it there. It would protect him. He could sleep as long as he could hear it.

I miss you.

"Ratchet. I'll kill them."