Work Text:
I wish that I had known in that first minute we met
The unpayable debt that I owed you
Because you'd been abused by the bone that refused you
And you hired me to make up for that
He looked small. That’s all that Drift could think, all that he could muster- Ratchet looked small. And he shouldn’t, he shouldn’t look small, because he’s Ratchet and he’s around the same height as Drift, and Drift is by no means a small mech. But on that slab, with the wires coming out from his arms and the monitors all around him, he looked small and fragile and like he could be broken in two by a strong gust of wind.
It wasn’t supposed to get this bad. There’d always be a way out of things for Drift. Always, there was a way out, and Drift cursed himself for thinking in such a childish way, but he couldn’t help it. Blind enthusiasm and hopefulness had gotten him this far, had gotten him through the hardest moments of his life, and so it was difficult to abandon even during what was by far the worst time of his life. Hopefulness in the face of sheer and guaranteed suffering was all that kept Drift going during the times where his faith failed him, when all he wanted was to shoot up and zone out for a few hours.
But he couldn’t relapse then, just as he couldn’t now, even though the desire was clear and present. He couldn’t relapse then for reasons that mattered much, much less than the reasons he had now- and he wasn’t about to give up anytime soon. He had to be there for Ratchet, and that entailed staying sober and staying by his side and keeping himself the fuck together, goddamnit.
Walking in that room when you had tubes in your arms
Those singing morphine alarms out of tune
Kept you sleeping and even, and I didn't believe them
When they called you a hurricane thunderclap
The nurses told Drift that Ratchet was a spitfire. It was hard to conceptualize from what he was seeing, but the hospital’s visitation policies meant- even with exceptions that they’d been allowed- that Drift still missed out on a good chunk of the day. It was during the times that Drift was absent that Ratchet apparently kicked up a storm, swearing and demanding to be out there helping other patients, and Drift would have found it cute if he didn’t know why it was happening. It would have been cute, sweet, whatever you could call it if it weren’t from confusion rather than Ratchet being his authentic self. Because Ratchet at Ratchet’s core was an ornery old man who refused to be put out to pasture, but these days, he couldn’t remember that.
Every day, Drift thanked the nurses who kept up with Ratchet for what they did, and he’d smile at the reports of Ratchet demanding to go back to work. In his better moments, Ratchet still asked for that. He all but begged Drift to let him go back out into the field, and Drift would have to remind him on a near-daily basis that there was no ‘field’ anymore, the war had been over for more than 700 years. Every human that Ratchet asked to see had been dead for generations. Every ally that Ratchet asked to rendezvous with had either died, too, or was too far away to be gathered to see him. Sideswipe, Bumblebee, Springer, Optimus- Drift grit his teeth at the fact that Ratchet seemed to be most determined to see his old friends that had passed on, themselves.
Drift wondered about calling some of their old friends who were still alive, but going through his contacts, he wondered just how many of them were in a place where they’d want to see their old friend stumbling and confused and a shell of his former self. The answer, it seemed, was ‘none of them that are in their right minds, and the ones that aren’t in their right minds shouldn’t be here anyways’. So that discounted Whirl, and Rodimus, and a dozen others right off the bat.
When I was checking vitals I suggested a smile
You didn't talk for a while, you were freezing
You said you hated my tone, it made you feel so alone
And so you told me I ought to be leaving
Drift didn’t get calls often from anyone besides the hospice, and so when he did get calls, he always braced himself for which would be the final one. Which would be either the ‘get over here as quickly as you can’, or which would be ‘you couldn’t make it in time, soz’. The ringing of the phone made him sick in a deep, twisting part of his stomach, and it sent him into a panic whenever it rang at night, especially.
The most recent call he’d gotten that hadn’t been from the hospital was Rodimus, so drunk he couldn’t speak in normal sentences, asking if he could borrow money from Drift. Drift accepted, and Rodimus seemed appreciative, but didn’t ask how things were going- but why would he? This entire thing was so out of nowhere, so foreign a concept to them, that Rodimus couldn’t have predicted it even if he wasn’t rotting his brain with engex. No Cybertronian had ever died of old age before; even Tailgate had recovered from his cybercrosis. But that was the problem: there was no one disorder wrong with Ratchet. He was, essentially, shutting down from inside, slowly decaying alive while his functions slowed and then stopped.
But something kept me standing by that hospital bed
I should have quit, but instead, I took care of you
Drift tried his best to be at Ratchet’s bedside in the final days. It was worse when Ratchet could still talk, and he spoke nonsense, all of which Drift still tried to field and form responses to as best as he could. When Ratchet lost the ability to speak, Drift was at least thankful that he seemed to be more at peace- at the very least, less confused. He looked around the room less, fidgeted less, pulled at his IVs less. Drift never wanted to be in a position where he was watching his lover slowly decay from the inside out, but he was at the very least thankful that Ratchet’s final days were spent sleeping peacefully.
When the alarms began to sound, Drift squeezed Ratchet’s hand tighter. He didn’t wake Ratchet up, wanting him to pass in his sleep if he could, but the old man woke up anyways. He made eye contact with Drift, and he was too far gone to smile, but there was something, something in his eyes that told Drift he was trying to. Drift smiled back at him and squeezed his hand even tighter, then leaned in and pressed a kiss to Ratchet’s forehead.
You made me sleep and uneven, and I didn't believe them
When they told me that there was no saving you.