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It just sucked because Bee had been actually looking forward to this medical appointment, for once. He’d done every single thing Ratchet had said to do, healing the slow way while Sari was out of commission, not transforming too much or driving too fast or doing anything interesting for like a whole year. Week. Whatever. He hadn’t even gotten to play with—uh, test—his upgraded stingers since the battle with the rock monster.
So he was ready to jump off the medical berth pretty much as soon as Ratchet said “Well, it looks like everything’s healed up nicely—hey!“
Actual jumping off the berth was thwarted by Ratchet’s arm landing on his thorax with a clang.
“Cool your stabilizers there, I’m not done!” Ratchet barked. “Everything’s healed up nicely, and I want to finish activating your claws, now that we have an astrominute and you might need them."
“My claws? I don’t have claws.” Bumblebee held up his servos and wiggled them in Ratchet’s face before Ratchet batted them away.
“You have claws, alright. They’re in your frame specs.” Ratchet flips a screen with a bunch of gobbledegook towards him like it's supposed to mean anything. “Looks like they’re meant for digging with. If we were back in the bad old days of Functionism, you’d probably have been a miner."
“A miner?” Bumblebee said, scrunching up his faceplate. “Weird.”
“Well, I’m not saying you have to use them that way,” Ratchet said, pulling out a couple of his tools. “But if I’m going to trust you not to take your optic out with weapons-grade stingers, and since we can’t say the Cons won’t be back any time soon—you might as well have all the advantages you can get.”
“Sure,” Bumblebee said. Having claws sounded pretty cool. Like one of those mods Prowl had tried out, except built in. Maybe they’d make him better at video games.
They did not make him better at video games.
He had to sit still for a stupid long time while Ratchet went servo by servo to pop out claws from the under the tips of his plating, and then fiddled with something in his processor so Bumblebee could pop them in and out as he needed them. And then he made Bumblebee pop them in and out a bunch of times to prove they worked or something, and then he let Bumblebee go. And then it turned out the claws scratched up the controller if he had them out, and if he didn’t have them out if he got too worked up or twisted his hands the wrong way they came out, and then the claws went right through the controller’s casing and broke it right as Bulkhead’s fighter punched his fighter off-screen.
“Ugggghhhhh,” Bumblebee groaned, flopping back into the couch and dropping the controller. Or. Trying to drop the controller. It was still stuck on his claws. He groaned again. “I thought mods were supposed to be cool. This sucks.”
“Well, you gotta practice!” Bulkhead said, having truncated his victory dance in respect for Bee’s misery. “I mean, when I started using my wrecking balls I knocked stuff over all the time.”
Bumblebee tipped his head to peer up at him. “Bulky, you still knock stuff over all the time.”
“But now I do it on purpose,” Bulkhead said. “C’mon. Ratchet said they were for mining, right?”
“Yeah,” Bumblebee muttered. “They couldn’t even be for something cool, like clawing up Decepticons."
”So, let’s go try them out!”
Bumblebee didn’t even get to start on a complaint before Bulkhead had scooped him up under one arm and begun hauling him enthusiastically outside.
They ended up at the mine where the spacebridge had been. Another of Bulkhead’s bright ideas.
“Are you sure?” Bumblebee asked, kicking the ground skeptically. “Remember what happened last time?”
“Are you planning to grab another transwarp drive?” Bulkhead asked him back. “Or any other machinery you don’t recognize?”
“Nope,” Bumblebee said, immediately.
“Then we’ll be fine.”
Turned out claws were great for climbing things. Bumblebee made it halfway up the wall without even really trying, Bulkhead walking around underneath him in case he fell.
“Okay, this is awesome,” Bee declared, hanging from a little crack with a great view of the sinkhole that led to open sky. He pulled himself even closer to the rock, picking his way along towards what looked like a tunnel. “There’s a tunnel!” And just large enough he could shove himself all the way into it. A whole new batch of coding had activated with the claw controls. He felt like he understood now how the rocks worked, where to dig in his claws to clear a path, which crevices kept going and which ones would close out and need him to tear through solid rock. That actually sounded kind of fun.
This coding was doing weird things to his processor, huh.
“Alright, I’m coming back out!” Bumblebee yelled back down to Bulkhead, after getting to a hairpin turn in the tunnel that he didn’t want to deal with. And then he realized he couldn’t turn around. “…slowly.”
Going backwards was harder than going forwards, but he was able to hook the front ridges of his pedes, the ones Sari kept calling his ’toes,’ into the sides of the tunnel and use them as leverage to get the rest of his chassis moved back down. His paint nanites were going to be a mess after this, and Prowl was going to smirk at him and it would be so dumb.
Ooh. Bumblebee could scratch him back and mess up his paint nanites now. Not that he would, Ratchet would give him a long lecture about using mods appropriately again, but he could.
“You doing okay in there, little buddy?” Bulkhead called from outside.
“Fine! I’m fine. Just making my way out.”
“If you say so.” A pause. “I bet I could bust you out, if you wanted.”
“I’m fine,” Bumblebee repeated, claws digging into the rock. It took him a few astroseconds to get them loose again. “I got this, okay?”
“Yes!” a distant voice agreed. “He’s got this, and I’ve got you!”
What the—when the slag did Blitzwing get here? Bee threw himself backward to try and get out of the tunnel faster, got stuck, and growled in frustration, claws sinking further into the rock.
By the time he finally managed to extract himself and move out slow but steady—yeah, maybe Optimus and Prowl were right sometimes but it wasn’t like Bee was getting trapped in tunnels of impenetrable rock all the time—Bulkhead and Blitzwing were grappling on the other side of the huge central cavern.
Well, good thing Bee had finally come off medical leave. He had some freshly upgraded stingers he was ready and willing to introduce this stupid ‘con to. And claws.
He swapped his servos to said claws as he ran for the fight, because if Bulkhead still had Blitzwing grappled the energy could transfer and zap him too.
“Hey Blitzbrain!” Bumblebee yelled, and swiped his claws against Blitzwing’s exposed wing, quick dart in and out of range again like he’d been trying to practice. It worked great, if Bee did say so himself, and he did! Blitzwing roared in pain, face swapping to red, and pulled back from Bulkhead to take a swipe of his own. Bee waved his new claws, threatening.
“I see the little bug now has a little bite,” Blitzwing growled. He dodged Bulkhead’s charge, crashing into the side of the cave as his face switched to blue. “What a shame. You would have been such a good Decepticon.” He fired a blaster bolt that Bumblebee had to drop to the ground to avoid, and switched faces again to black and fangy. “You already have the backstabbing down, after all!”
Bumblebee flipped his stingers out, slowly circling around to get closer to Bulkhead. “What are you talking about?”
“Yeah!” Bulkhead said, taking a step to give Bumblebee some cover behind his solid leg plating. “Leave him alone.”
Another face change, back to blue and sneering. “How cute. You actually think you like each other. Well.” He fired off another couple of blasts before Bulkhead’s throw of a wrecking ball made him switch to jet mode and circle the ceiling, taking potshots. “I know something you don’t know…”
“Why didn’t you tell me I was a Decepticon?!” Bumblebee blurted out, grabbing the medbay table to stop himself from slamming into it as he skidded into the room.
Ratchet scowled over the table at him, distracted from some way less important project. “Unless you’ve been doing something truly stupid with your spark chamber and that slag heap Megatron, you’re no more a Decepticon than I am.”
Bumblebee’s claws dug into the table with an awful skreech before he remembered to retract them. “Don’t lie to me!”
“And don’t poke holes in my medberth! It’s sorry enough as it is.” Ratchet’s scowl shifted from ‘stop playing video games while Prowl’s meditating’ to ‘where did you get that dent.’ “What’s gotten into you?”
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe I just found out my whole life is a lie!” Bumblebee threw himself face first onto the medberth. “Because according to stupid Blitzwing, I was built to be a stupid Decepticon!”
“Ah, slag.” And now it sounded like Ratchet’s scowl had changed again into his ‘worried about Omega Supreme’ face. “Look, kid…”
“Don’t call me kid.”
“Bumblebee. Look at me.”
Bumblebee slowly pried one side of his faceplate off the medberth, optic-ing Ratchet in a way Sentinel had made him do transform-ups for in basic training. Ratchet was sitting down now, looking…looking ‘Sari just turned into a living energy weapon and almost offlined’ serious. Uh oh. Bumblebee would have been a lot more confident about that little voice that said Blitzwing had probably been lying if Ratchet had kept yelling at him. Maybe he was a Decepticon.
“You’re not a Decepticon,” Ratchet said, levelly. “Not to say you couldn’t become one if you put your processor to it—far as I can tell, they take anyone they can get—but where you come from and what you’re built for doesn’t mean a damn thing compared to what you choose to do. Alright?”
“So Blitzwing was right,” Bumblebee said. He felt like his spark was going numb. “I was built by the Decepticons.”
Ratchet groaned and pinched his chevron. “What—exactly—did Blitzwing say to you?”
Bumblebee hid his face in the berth again. “That it was a shame they’d given me up, because I’d turned into a nasty little fighter,” he mumbled. “He said I really could have been something as a Decepticon, and that he liked my claws, and. Some other stuff.”
“Some other stuff?”
”Stupid stuff. Stupid Blitzwing.” Bumblebee pushed his helm into the medberth harder and let his legs hang limp, pulling him down. “He said I only—he said Bulkhead’s only my friend because he’s built to like me. Because we’re both. Mining frames, or something.”
“Did he now,” Ratchet said. “Was Bulkhead with you?”
Bumblebee slithered backwards off the medberth. There was just enough of a gap near the floor he could shove himself into it. So he did, headfirst. “Yeah. I uh. Beat him back to base.” So maybe he ran away. So what. It wasn’t like Bulkhead would want to hang out with someone built by Decepticons.
At that moment, there was a knock on the door to the medbay. Bumblebee curled up in the smallest ball he could. “Uh, Ratchet?” Bulkhead asked. He sounded out of breath. “Bee’s in here, right?”
“Yes,” Ratchet shouted back. “Go away. We’re discussing confidential medical information.”
“Okay.” Bumblebee waited for the sound of his steps, walking away. “Hey, little buddy…if you wanna talk when you get out, I’ll uh…I’ll be in my room.”
Bumblebee didn’t say anything. His claws had popped out again, and he was trying to get them to retract.
“Oh, Vector Sigma,” Ratchet grumbled after Bulkhead was gone. “Get out here. I can’t talk to you if I can’t see you."
Bumblebee, as a compromise, stuck his helm out from Ratchet’s side of the medberth to peer up at him, suspiciously. The rest of his chassis was going to stay right in his safe new hole, thank you very much.
“Back after the War…” Ratchet said, slowly, like he was getting started on one of his stories so old it was covered in rust. “…when the Allspark was thrown through a spacebridge, for parts unknown, we still had some sparks. So did the Decepticons. They’d been hoarding them whenever they got the chance, smuggling them off Cybertron, raiding the cold storage facilities. The Allspark wasn’t in shards back then, but you could freeze the bits it spat out. They would last until you had a suitable protoform available to pop them into and you’d end up with a perfectly good mech.” Ratchet blew out a breath. “Thing is, some of the ones the Autobots made could fly, and some of the ones the Decepticons made couldn’t. They didn’t want those. We didn’t want the flightframes. So the Commands on both sides went around the Tyrest accords to make an agreement. Both sides would spark their protoforms at the same time, and then…we’d swap.” Ratchet peered down at Bee. “He probably found out you were one of those generations.”
“So I was—" Bee started, before Ratchet held up a hand.
“So were plenty of mechs. So was Sentinel, according to his chart when I examined him on Earth. Come to think of it, so was Longarm, that Head of Intelligence you admire so much.” Ratchet scratched at the already-scratched lower part of his faceplate, discoloring the metal further. “You and Bulkhead both being mining frames, well, I suppose that’s true, but it’s got slag-all to do with you two being friends."
“How are we both mining frames? He looks nothing like me! I’m…” Bumblebee shrank into himself. “…little." He couldn’t get rid of Blitzwing’s mocking voice bouncing around the inside of his processor, calling him a little bug. Joking about squashing him. Nothing and nobody squashed Bulkhead.
“From what I’ve heard, mining’s a complicated operation. You need different workers.” Ratchet leaned back. “You can’t knock down a wall like he does, but he can’t get in a crack the way you do.” He lightly tapped one pede on the side of the berth and raised an optic-guard at Bumblebee.
Bee pulled his helm back into his hole. “Great. So I would have been a Decepticon, except they didn’t even want me, and now I’m just a freak."
“You’re not a freak,” Ratchet barked at him. “Knock that slag off. Are you gonna call Bulkhead a freak next because he’s got wrecking balls? Or Optimus because he’s got fangs?”
Bumblebee poked his helm out again to squint at Ratchet. “Optimus has fangs?”
Ratchet frowned. “Come to think of it, I might need to activate those too.” He shook his head, a gesture he’d picked up from Sari. “Not the point! Quit saying that about yourself and get out from under there. I’ve got work to get back to."
Bumblebee got out from under the medbay table once Ratchet started prodding him with an extendable wrench. Nothing good ever came from Ratchet breaking out the extendable wrench.
He was just going to go back to his room, or maybe go climb Prowl’s tree until Prowl made him leave, but he snuck past Bulkhead’s door and didn’t hear anything.
No painting, no Bulkhead humming or muttering while he worked. No thumping as he tried to practice those stretches Prowl was teaching him. No delighted chuckling as he read through something new about spacebridges.
Bulkhead was quiet when he didn’t want people to notice him. Not when he was at their base. Not when he was comfortable.
The door was open. Bumblebee snuck back.
“Uh, Bulkhead?”
Bulkhead looked up from where he was examining a datapad. “Oh. Hey, little—hey, Bee.”
“Hey, Bulkie.” Bumblebee came in slowly, dropping to sit not too far away. “Uh. Sorry for running out on you. Like that. I shouldn’t have left you alone.”
“It’s fine,” Bulkhead said, sounding very tired. Like when they were hunting for pieces of a broken spacebridge and he was tired of explaining things Bumblebee didn’t want to hear. “I get it.”
“I mean.” Bee shifted. “If it helps, Ratchet said all of that stuff, about us being built to be friends, was a load of slag.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Oh, that had been the wrong thing to say. “Of course it’s a load of slag. Obviously it’s a load of slag. As if you would ever be a Decepticon.”
Bumblebee slowly dragged one claw along the ground, not looking up. It scritched on the cement floor.
“What does Blitzwing know, anyway? He’s just lying to make trouble. Don’t listen to him, Bee, we all know better.”
“Ratchet—” Bumblebee had to reset his vocalizer. “Ratchet says I was too. Built by the Decepticons, I mean. They just didn’t want me.”
“Oh.” All of the confidence ran out of Bulkhead’s voice like overturned oil.
“Yeah.” Bee kept scratching at the floor, the strange new code in his processor already working out the best way to break through the concrete, what weak points to get it. He didn’t get the chance to get too far into it before Bulkhead scooped him up.
“Wha—” Bumblebee tried to say, into Bulkhead’s chest plating.
“Shhhhh,” Bulkhead said, rocking him back and forth like Sari with her dogbot. “It’s okay. I gotcha.”
“Bulkhead,” Bumblebee complained, still muffled. He wiggled a little in protest. Bulkhead didn’t let go.
“So what if the Decepticons didn’t want you,” Bulkhead said. “They’re Decepticons. They’re stupid. We knew that.”
Bumblebee gave up trying to get out and let himself relax into the little dark cave of Bulkhead’s grip. It was kind of nice. “Thanks, Bulkhead.”
He let himself sit there for a while, and then said “You know we’re not friends because of coding or anything like that, right? That was a lie. We’re friends.”
“I know,” Bulkhead said.
“Okay. Good.”
“I checked. There’s nothing in my coding that would do that.”
“You—checked your own coding?”
“I can have hobbies.”