Chapter Text
It took two weeks after the Nyon contingent’s arrival to the Autobot Peace Accords for anyone to realize that Flashflare wasn’t the Nyon’s leader.
Oh, Rodimus couldn’t blame them - Nyon had kept the identity of their little rebellion faction a secret through the war, and they weren’t letting it be more than an open secret after - and watching the big bastards sputter when they realized he’d sent in a femme whose entire experience in leadership boiled down to foreman of a factory line pre-war was the funnest thing he’d done in vorns.
But it means that, instead of exploring the remains of Iacon as he’d done for the last few weeks, he’s stuck in the Tower, doing actual negotiations. There was a reason he’d sent in Flashflare, and it wasn’t just because she was a red racer with a flame-themed paint job. There are plenty of those in Nyon now.
It’s because he has no fragging patience for this bullshit.
He’s stepping out of another meeting, so late it’s practically fragging early, when he runs into one of the religious kids from Crystal City - Drift, he remembers, taking in the swords and the gun and the delightfully sharp canines. The mech smiles too much for the teeth he has.
Drift isn’t smiling now. He jerks forward as Rodimus jerks back, big hands sliding around to cup Rodimus’s sharp elbows. “Sorry!”
His hands are chill, the palms cool enough to feel like there’s no engine heat in them at all. Rodimus almost allows himself to enjoy it. “It’s fine, it’s - yeah, you’re cool. Not so close though, yeah?” He brushes off the mech’s hands. “Might not be someone you like running into next time.”
“Everyone keeps saying that. I can take care of myself.” He pouts prettily - the mech is devastatingly pretty, the kind that would’ve gotten snatched up quick in Pre-Uprising Nyon - before taking a step back from him. “I’m Drift.”
“I know.”
“That’s where most mechs introduce themselves.”
“I know.” It’s Rodimus’s turn to smile. He hopes it doesn’t feel forced. He can feel the others cycling out of the meeting room. He turns his new name around in his mouth, chewing on the syllables. It still feels weird to use it. “Call me Roddy.”
“Roddy.” He says it like he’s trying it on. “Roddy.”
“That’s me. Just me.”
“Then it’s nice to meet you.”
Rodimus can feel them studying each other, Crystal City devotee to disaffected Prime. He’s tired and annoyed from the meeting, and the mech’s nice, and he doesn’t want to be in the damn Tower for another minute. And Slinger always said Roddy could find fun in the bottom of a mine shaft. “Hey, you wouldn’t happen to know your way around Iacon, would you?”
“No. This is my first time on this part of the planet.”
“Awesome. You ever done a derby race before…?
—
Drift ends up being a funny sort of mech.
Not funny in a way Rodimus would laugh at. His jokes are dry as road rust, and half the time he looks like he doesn’t realize he’s making a joke. It’s like he doesn’t understand how he’s talking, or what jokes are when they’re not about crushing some new rubber’d idiot against a turnpike barrier. He understands violence well enough. It’s the other stuff he’s missing out on.
Rodimus realizes this partway through their first race, and by the third, his engine overheating, axles aching, a bite to every invent that he’s somehow missed since the War ended, tells him something he has in common with Drift:
Neither of them is good at stopping.
Rodimus realizes this just as they’re circling the last lap. They’ve got some pretty blue Praxi squashed between them, Drift shoving them both towards the highway barrier.
Most of Iacon’s highways had escaped carpet bombing. The worst of the war’s damage was off to the east side of the city, towards Kaon. In the wake of the War it’s where Rodimus has tracked down the actually interesting parts of Iacon to.
That means that the roads they’re racing on are either repurposed sewer lines or barely holding themselves together. Rodimus was used to slag roads, seeing as Nyon’s weren’t much better, and he’d assumed that Drift was too. He’d caught the edge of Dead End in the soft roll of his r’s and the way he swallows the back ends of his words. Rodion and Nyon were close during the War, before Rodion had finally fallen on the side of the Decepticons. Rodimus knew a good number of mechs from the worst parts of the city.
Apparently, Drift had been somewhere nice enough to forget small things, like when you hit a pothole, your back end jumps.
His tires bite into the broken asphalt, frame dipping down and then up. His left tire turns, hits the edge of the hole, and Rodimus feels when control of Drift’s momentum is wrenched from his servos. His back wheel hits it, harder, and he’s going too fast and the momentum has to go somewhere. Rodimus can feel the shift in Drift’s driving through his spoiler wings, moments before the mech himself does.
Then he’s airborne. And then he’s hitting the Praxi’s side and shoving them both off the highway and down, tumbling, off the flying highway.
Luck - and Iacon’s congested roadways - means that it’s not a long fall. There’s only about the height and a half of a tall cargo truck between the highway below them.
Training is a hard thing to throw off, even after almost a year of peace. Rodimus is used to being small, aerodynamic, and well-armored; he was made for taking a crash or two. He tucks his knees up to his chest, hands over his audials, and prepares himself for a fragging awkward conversation with the onsite-medic.
He feels Han arm wrap around his waist like an iron rebar, frame jerking to a standstill in midair. It feels like he’s knocked his fuel pump back against his spine, but at least he didn’t crumple his shoulder armor or break a leg strut like he was expecting to. Only so many ways you can roll off a crash like that, and he’s learned which ones are going to suck the worst through pure experience.
He tilts his helm back. He can see straight up a dark nose, and yellow optics are staring down at him, overbright and amused. “I can’t believe you didn’t even try to save yourself.”
Rodimus wiggles his spoiler wings, pressed flush against the mech’s broad chest. He turns to see that even the damn Praxi managed to dig his claws into the broken barrier wall, and he’s now using them to crawl his way back onto the highway. Fucking Praxis and their damn claws.
“Not all of us are capable of literally grabbing concrete,” he gripes. He clutches at a bit of jutting kibble on his forearm as Drift starts hauling them up and back onto the highway. “And I’ve crashed tons of times.”
“Should I be concerned about your driving skills?”
“Should I be worried about yours? You’re the one that drove me off the side of the highway.”
“It was a pothole!”
Rodimus wriggles free of the mech as soon as they’re most of the way back on the high way, too aware of the way he’s scraping paint off on the asphalt. He’s going to need more than just a few touch ups now. “You’re a racer! You should be used to pot holes!”
“I’m -“
“Are we continuing the race?” The Praxi who’d gone over with them is standing near where the center line in the highway used to be, studying one of his servos. It looks like he’d lost the tip of one claw in the wall when he went over. “Because if we’re not I’m going to comm this in and head back to collect my shanix.”
Rodimus is opening his mouth to snipe back - Nyons don’t drop a race! - when the idiot who’d pushed them over cuts in.
“Don’t think I can keep going.” He holds up the hand that he’d used to keep Rodimus from toppling off the highway. “My hand’s messed up pretty bad.” There’s sparks coming from the joint. It looks like he snapped the strut and a few wires, besides.
Rodimus looks at it and grimaces. “Yeah, we’re both done. I’ve got to show space case here to my medbay.”
“I’m not a -“
“Don’t argue with me. Just transform before what’s left of Iacon’s Enforcers come around and see why we’re out here making a mess.” Rodimus folds down just as the Praxi takes off down the highway again. “Can’t believe I’m throwing this race to take care of you.”
“You don’t have to.”
“But I’m going to. Didn’t I say transform?” He nudges his trunk against Drift’s leg until the mech steps back and transforms. He knows his own frame well enough to know that, while derby racing would be a bad idea, a drive back to the Tower wouldn’t do him any worse for wear. “Besides, I think there’d be some diplomatic incident if I left with you and came back without you.”
“Maybe a minor one.” There’s laughter clinging to the edge of Drift’s voice. “But I’m not exactly important. I’m just a stray Wing took in.”
“Didn’t think Crystal City took in strays.”
“They don’t, normally. I was a special case.” He follows Rodimus’s taillights. Without him he’d probably have gotten lost already; Iacon is the special kind of mazy that only comes from a city having been built on top of itself for millennia. “Wing’s a good mentor.”
“He’s kept you clean?”
Drift’s engine doesn’t even hitch. He’s had this question tossed at him often enough in Crystal City, like they were just waiting for him to slip up. “I got myself clean. But he’s helped keep me there. I like to think he’s part of the reason I’ve done so well.”
“That’s good. Saw plenty of backsliding after the war. I guess it’s easier to stay clean when no one has time to make what you need.” Rodimus, at least, doesn’t sound judgmental. Just factual, and quietly mournful. How many of his friends had backslid like that once Nyon had to rebuild and not just fight to keep moving forward?
“You one of those?”
The question gapes between them for several long minutes. “No, no. Tried it when I was younger, everyone where I’m from does, but I like going fast too much to give it up for a bit of cloudiness in my processor. And nothing hits my system quite the same as a normal mech’s, so stims have never done the trick. Guess I got lucky.”
“It doesn’t have to do with luck.”
“It has every thing to do with luck. The luck of being sparked to the right people, at the right time, in the right place, with the right frame, to keep that first hit from either never reaching you or never taking hold.” Rodimus twitches his spoiler wingtips, taking a sharp turn down a ruined alleyway. Someone really should be doing a better job of rebuilding the city; its liable to turn into a slum if they leave it so long mechs are forced to move back in out of necessity.
“Guess you were born lucky, then.”
“Like I said. Didn’t have the frame type that would let me get addicted. That’s more luck than some of my friends have had.”
“You usually have that kind of luck?”
“I was sparked in Nyon. Should tell you enough.”
“Used to be the place to source clean speeders.”
“Then you know the sort of luck I have.”
—
Sneaking in past the guards isn’t as hard as it should be. Rodimus should probably bring that up to someone on his way out.
For now, it works to their advantage.
Laughter bubbles up and catches itself behind his denta as the two sneak through the hallways. It’s just - ridiculous.
He’d been a sneak during part of the war, before the Nyan uprising had gone full surge. He’d slipped through alleyways, behind unsuspecting mechs, through more than one blockade …
But that was in war, and they’re not at war anymore.
Now, this is just for fun. For them.
They’re still laughing as they roll into the medbay, the unfamiliar swordsmech pulled along behind Rodimus. He can tell that Drift is in pain, even as tightly held in his field as that pain is, and he passes Drift over to the scowling … nurse? Medic? The mech is old, but they walked in on him scrubbing down tools, and Rodimus has caught enough bad soap operas to know that medics in Iacon were too damn busy to clean their own tools. The nurses always did that, on the static-choked shows they’d catch spare glimpses of, if the signal broke through the smog well enough.
The medic regards them with a spare sort of iciness. “And what can I do for you two fine mechs?”
Rodimus lets the sarcasm pass right over his helm. “Drift broke himself!”
“You - you helped!”
“I would have been fine.” Rodimus tugs the mech in front of him, nudging him towards the medic. Medics were good - they could cause pain as easily as they ended it, but he’s pretty good at spotting those by now and this mech, with the paint worked off the seams of his fingers and the way he laid the tools out carefully beside the sink where he was cleaning them, wouldn’t be one of the ones who hurt. “You’re the one that grabbed me.”
The medic makes an irritable noise. He glances between the two speedsters, fingers working along the long, thin arm of a wrench. "Get on the berth. However stupid you were acting when you got hurt, I'm still required to treat your dumb aft."
Drift inches around them both and towards the nearest medberth. "Yeah? That mean you're gonna use the right meds?"
The look the mech gives him for the comment is scathing. "I don't fragging use the wrong meds on mechs."
“Uh… huh. You done putting dents in that wrench, then?”
“Shut up and give me that arm.” The medic drops the wrench - the edges of its handle warped in vaguely finger-shaped waves - into a pan next to the berth.
Rodimus skirts the edges of what is obviously the medic’s territory. He’s always been eager to watch medics work; in the war he’d gotten all the wrong kinds of chances to do so, and while they’d been informative they’d also usually been a test of how well he could withstand pain and panic. The battlefield isn’t where warriors learn to rebuild mechs.
The medic is grumbling under his breath as he tests the range of motion Drift has left in his forearm. “You’re lucky. Outside of a few burst lines and strained cords, this is largely cosmetic. This is part of your transformation sequence, isn’t it? Looks like you have a hinge pulled back too far.”
Drift pokes the tip of his glossa between his teeth, delicately pointed nose wrinkling up. “And it doesn’t hurt much, so a quick patch up job -”
“I wasn’t done.” The mech’s tone brooks no argument; Rodimus’s mouth closes so fast his teeth make an audible clacking noise. “Your initial injury is fine, but you’re showin’ the kinds of wear and tear on your frame that means you’re more liable to get injured like this. Your friend was right - sort of. He’d’ve been fine. You should have been fine.” He’s still talking as he begins repairs; a pin to one of the sensor lines in the crook of Drift’s elbow deadened the sensors from the midarm down, and careful, quick movements are deconstructing it with a sort of swift ease Rodimus has never seen before.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re falling apart at the seams.” He makes the point of digging the sharp tip of an armor pick between the seam of his wrist plating, peeling one back with an awful noise. “I’d just replace your whole arm if I didn’t think it’d just fragging fall of.”
“It’s not that bad.”
The medic scoffs. “Between the obvious malnutrition, what looks like syc waste build up, strain from multiple previous injuries -”
“Not all of us are soft little medics safe in their Tower.”
“War’s over. The point is that you should not be built this bad.” Clever fingers are replacing the bent, warped set of transformation hinges that had caused all this. “Come back here tomorrow, mid-cycle. If you’re not, Pax has given me full authorization to hunt down medbay escapees with a tranq gun.”
“Are you threatening me to get treatment?”
“I’m giving you a courtesy warning. You’re in at the end of my shift, and I don’t have time to give you a full frame assessment.You’ll be coming in tomorrow so I can, and in to every appointment after that so I can make sure you’re getting the right sort of fix.”
“I have diplomatic duties -”
“Your party agreed to treatment from the Tower as part of your diplomatic work here, kid. Nice try, though, if every other idiot that’s come through here hadn’t tried that.” He’s sanding away the outer layer of Drift’s forearm paint, his transformed hand moving in smooth, efficient motions. “Every mech in this Tower is under the purvey of this medbay, and no medic here is going to let a mech walk around hurtin’ like you are. You need a full frame overhaul at the least.”
“And what’s that gonna cost me?”
The medic looks at him like he’s an idiot. “We’re charging the senate for parts cost. Where do you think all the shanix went?”
“... I assumed it was pocketed.”
“Ha! You haven’t met Pax yet, have you? The idiot doesn’t have fragging selvish in his lexicon. The shanix the Senators surrendered was put in a pool. It’s part of negotiations, but until they make any decisions on it, it’s paying for … well, for this.” He makes a circular motion with his shoulder. “Fuel, medical - well, pretty much everything y’all have seen that isn’t being set aside for reparations and repairs is going to you.”
“... huh.” Rodimus leans against the back of the medberth, left elbow jutted against the side of Drift’s thigh. “Didn’t think they cared that much.”
The medic scoffs under his breath. “Is this idiocy why I keep having to practically kidnap you idiots to get you into my medbay?”
“No one likes surprise billing.”
“It’s fragging free!” No matter how loud he gets, his hands remain gentle. “And you’re both coming back in. The Nyan party’s just as bad as the fragging Decepticons -”
“I’m part of the Crystal City contingent.”
He scoffs. “I’m not an idiot, kid. I was on the frontlines.”
“And what’s that -”
“Don’t move, I just bent your plating back into shape. It needs time to cool.” The snarl of his engine is enough to startle both Racers into stillness. “Now. Idiot number two. You’re gonna make sure this idiot gets back here tomorrow.”
Rodimus takes a moment to consider this. He … well. All he has to do tomorrow is avoid all the mechs who want him to work. “Sure. You gonna get us permission off work?”
“Anyone who tries to stop you can deal with me.”
Another moment of consideration, and Rodimus nods. “Can we get a name, then, if we’ve been ordered into your care?”
“... Ratchet.” He drops Drift’s hands. “You’re good for tonight. Don’t move the arm too much and don’t make me hunt you down. You won’t like me if I have to hunt you down.”
Duly commanded, both mechs make their harried way out of the medbay.
It’s Rodimus who stops just outside the door. “So… are you going back tomorrow?”
“Why are you asking?”
“Because I want to know if he’ll be too busy hunting you down to hunt me down.”
Drift considers him; taller and stronger than most, bright paint, but an edge to his field that screams hunger. “Crystal city will pay for my treatment, even if he was lying. I’m going back.”
Rodimus groans. “Frag. I guess that means I’m going with you, huh?”
“I never invited you.”
“Eh. Semantics.”