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The reality of space travel is that it’s boring.
Despite every innovation made by millions of races, from space bridges and teleportation technology to high-powered ships and jump drives and hyperspace, it always was, and always will be, boring. As large as the galaxy is, reaching the edge just simply means that you can travel beyond.
The black abyss spread out for seemingly forever, and even fast ships seemed to drift through the expanse of nothingness endlessly. Stars moved by slowly, and the silence was overwhelming. The silence and void were endless, but large starships and luxury space cruisers, in their massive builds sometimes miles long and hundreds of floors, were filled with music and light and color. It was a way to illuminate the dark and enjoy the journey.
A tiny shuttle, like the one Drift and Ratchet now occupied, was no such massive cruise liner. Instead, it was far more pedestrian, more utilitarian. It was far from beautiful, covered in dents and puttering along through the dark, scraped together with all the parts they could barter or buy.
The sound that occupied the small shuttle was that of the engines of two bots. It was complemented by the light of cyan and red consoles glowing softly through the darkness, the rattling of something that was definitely broken and barely functioning, and the slight whirr from the vibration of the engines behind them. Time ticked by slowly as power and fuel gauges slowly ticked down from the thousands of megamiles they’d put between themselves and the previous planet.
They’d been there for days, and there were many more to go.
Drift sat with his helm on the console, optics nearly closed. “Should’ve splurged for the warp drive.”
Ratchet emerged from behind him, sidestepping between the two chairs as he shuffled back to his seat. “And you were going to pay for it? We wouldn’t be able to buy fuel.”
“I could. With a few bounties.”
“You need fuel to chase those bounties.”
“I’d… make it work,” Drift grumbled, turning his helm to the side. He was about to let it slide off of the console, but Ratchet’s hand slammed down beside it, eliciting a startled jump. “Yikes! The frag was that for?!”
Ratchet slowly removed his hand, crossing his arms as he sank into the chair. “I know you want to be all dramatic, but if you keep wiping your face across the console, you’re going to hit some buttons and accidentally eject all of our supplies, or turn off the autopilot.”
“Mehhhh,” Drift retorted eloquently. “It’s fine if you disable autopilot. I’m a professional. I can fly us to the next spaceport just fine.”
But this just prompted Ratchet to roll his optics. “We have different definitions of fine. Fine isn’t just ‘intact and functioning.’”
“Yeah, that’s fine.”
“Fine isn’t—!” Ratchet cut himself off, realizing that the conversation would quickly devolve into another pointless argument. Maybe an argument would pass the time a bit quicker, but he wasn’t ready to sacrifice his fuel pressure for a “yeah-huh, nuh-uh”-type of bickering for a few joors when instead he could listen to the broken gravity simulator rattle. He should have brought a few more medical datapads. Maybe at least then there’d be something more worth reading. He turned off his optics, leaning his helm back.
There was a sound that he chose to ignore, likely Drift flopping onto the floor melodramatically, or something similar. Ratchet wondered if it was worth it to come all the way out here in search of him in the first place. Had he really missed him that sorely? Something in his spark regretted yelling at Rodimus just before he’d left, too. Not because Rodimus didn’t deserve it—he did, that kid was terrible at getting things through his processor, but because it hadn’t actually done anything. It didn’t make him feel any better.
What was the point, if it hadn’t changed anything? He could have just kept it to himself and silently left.
“What is that, anyway?”
The sound of Drift’s voice snapped Ratchet back to reality, and he powered his optics back on. Drift was pointing at the tiny statue of himself that Ten had made. Ratchet had removed it from the dashboard after three too many bumpy landings (reminder to self: fix landing gear stabilizers) and tucked it up on the magnetic shelf.
“It’s you.”
“Yeah, I noticed. I’m adorable. Do I really look that scary, though?”
“You carry around tons of swords, and you make that face all the time.”
The autopilot’s fuel alarm started going off, flashing a bright blue that illuminated them both in staccato beats. Neither mech reacted to it at first, as neither was willing to secede the conversation there.
“I do not make that face all the time! I’m jubilant and approachable,” Drift retorted.
“Jubilant? Pfft. If you say so. You just act approachable, that doesn’t mean you are approachable,” Ratchet clarified. “Besides. Perhaps I just wanted some company, and that thing is far better company than you are.” He hoped that was enough of a conversation ender. With how much Drift was being… himself, Ratchet wasn’t really ready to tell him about his reasons. After hearing a mech like Brainstorm wax poetic about how the Lost Light was his home and how the ship was loaded with misfits who weren’t ready to rebuild a broken planet or return to society after spending so much (or all) of their lives at war, Ratchet had wanted to bring Drift home.
Not that he knew Drift wanted to come home, or if Drift felt the same way. He wasn’t sure if that mattered. If Drift didn’t want to return to the Lost Light, they… didn’t need to. That, or Ratchet could go back alone; Ratchet had a bad habit of going wherever he felt needed, rather than where he wanted to be. Generally, he just told himself he wanted to be wherever he was needed, and left it at that.
“And… it just happens to be shaped like, painted like, and look like me?” Drift asked, his tone rhetorical enough that Ratchet let his digits twitch with the urge to punch him.
“And it just happens to look like you, yes.”
Drift’s smirk made his face approximately 200% more punchable. “Soooo, you wanted a mini-me to keep you company~”
Ratchet chose to divert his attention by taking his seat and leaning over the console. The autopilot was beeping again, and Ratchet was impressed by Drift’s ability to intentionally ignore warning alarms.
Drift’s “cute” act wouldn’t work on him. It worked around Rodimus, but that was probably also because Rodimus also did a “cute” act.
There was something… pathetic? Awkward? Unsettling? Ridiculous? About some of the oldest mecha alive pretending to be naive, but perhaps it was their own form of escapism. Ratchet wasn’t one to judge how others coped with millions of years of trauma, but he felt plenty justified in finding it annoying when Drift clearly behaved this way expressly to get a rise out of him.
“Anyway!” Ratchet interjected, pulling up the holoscreen. “We’ll only have enough fuel to make it to the next station if we conserve. We can reduce speed, and use the gravity of the third Gemini Belt to help propel us there.”
“Asteroids, huh? Yeah, we can tether the ship to one and ride it for a while.”
Of course, they both knew “a while” meant a quartex or two.
Ratchet lay back in his chair and offlined his optics. Even in this state of not-quite-dozing, he felt Drift’s field in proximity to his own. Drift tended to keep it close to his plating, only pushing outwards when he was trying to express something, or look more welcoming for some reason. This ship was still small enough that it constantly brushed against Ratchet’s own electromagnetic field.
It was almost intimate, though neither said anything of it.
~☆~
“I hate the third Gemini Belt,” Ratchet said.
It was a statement, not a complaint.
They’d landed their small shuttle on a large asteroid in the second gemini belt, part of a fairly fast-moving asteroid belt in the Phyrex system. This solar system had a faster rotation speed due to the oblong shape of its sun, which was misshapen from thousands of years of solar mining by a nearby civilization. Most locals had cleared out of the system as the sun grew less stable, and the multiple asteroid belts were a minefield of hazards for passing ships, filled with space flotsam.
They both sat atop their tiny shuttle, which they’d magnetized onto the asteroid for now. All around them, stars winked in and out of existence, briefly obscured by surrounding asteroids in the dark. The sun was far too distant to fully illuminate them, but this in itself was reminiscent of Cybertron.
The starscape flickered above them, and sometimes bits of ice and metal around them glittered from the glow of their headlights.
“Yeah, I know. You hate everything,” Drift answered with a shrug. “How long do we want to wait here?”
“Long enough until we’re in range of the station. If we take off at the right angle, we should have enough fuel to make it, and the velocity will give us a boost.”
“Heh, sounds like something I would do.”
Ratchet chose to ignore the chuckle in Drift's voice.
“Well, you're here with me, so it is something you're doing,” he countered.
They sat there for some time. As always, silence reigned.
Though their asteroid was moving, the stars drifted by as slowly as ever. The cold dark around them stretched on into infinity, and here, they were simply two mechanisms sitting alone on a frozen rock.
Finally, Drift leaned forward, pressing a hand to the top of their little ship. “I hear something.”
“No you don’t, it’s space. It’s not—”
But Ratchet paused. It wasn’t a vibration, but he could sense something. An energy nearby. Not a ship, but perhaps creatures. Giant bats of ice and crystal swarmed nearby, displaced by the movement of the asteroids.
Drift held up a hand then paused, reaching for a blaster. “How about I teach you how to shoot? If we’re going to hunt bounties for a while to pay for repairs, might as well, right?”
The space bats were common in this region, but the only way to spot them against the blackness was to wait for their bodies to shine. As they drew closer, their bodies began to glimmer in the light of the ship’s lights. They darted in and out between the nearby rocks, not quite sparkling, but a series of quick flickers in the path of the beams.
Of course, Ratchet had a feeling that Drift might just be trying to show off, but he wasn’t going to ruin Drift’s mood. “Okay, fine. But don’t use that. Get the magnet harpoon. If you don’t shatter the core, we can cook a few of them up for some fuel.”
Drift placed the harpoon gun in Ratchet’s hands, guiding him on how to hold it. “Now, like any weapon, you have to account for the way it moves when it fires, and sync up your targeting systems. Don’t aim for the body, as shattering the core will destroy the integrity of the crystal. Lots of bots rely just on their targeting systems, rather than actually compensating for the distance between—”
Thwip!
Thwip!
Thwip!
Three bats landed on the bare metal in front of Drift.
Thwip!
Ratchet was already reeling in the fourth as he released the electromagnet. Gripped by the thick membrane of its wing, it fell into Ratchet’s hand, inert.
“—Huh.” Drift didn’t even know how to react.
“I already know how to shoot. I’m a doctor, you think I don’t know how to defend myself or my patients?” He peeled each catch open slowly, breaking out the smooth crystals inside.
“Maybe I wanted to impart some of my sharpshooting knowledge to you!”
“It was a rhetorical question,” Ratchet deadpanned.
As romantic as it could have been to build a small campfire and cook them beneath the stars, it wasn’t practical. Instead they sat together at the back of the shuttle, side by side in front of the furnace. Rather than throw out the carcasses, Drift folded the wings together to make a small bowl for the delicate crystals within, which they placed at the edge of the furnace. Every few minutes, Ratchet reached inside with a pair of forceps, rotating the bowl so it heated evenly.
Maybe Drift wanted to sit and watch the crystals melting, but Ratchet caught him stealing glances at him as the minutes ticked by. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” Drift countered. “I just didn’t think you knew about space wildlife. It’s sort of a knowledge base you develop when you spend a lot of time out here on your own, not in the Autobot… military, or whatever.”
“I spent a lot of time on the outer rim. I went where there were patients, and that was everywhere,” Ratchet answered, not meeting Drift’s gaze. He kept his attention on the furnace, watching the crystals melt into a swirl of blue and purple gel, and eventually turn to liquid.
There was an unspoken acceptance between them. Deadlock did his fair share of filling hospital slabs, and that sometimes the job of battlefield medic was more about being a scavenger and coroner than conducting repairs.
Still, Drift’s expression was both blank and intense as he watched the furnace. The orange and blue flames cast a soft glow against his visage. His field was drawn close to his armor, small and guarded.
The pregnant pause grew into a silence that shifted from awkward to contemplative.
“There’s no reason to feel guilty about it,” Ratchet finally added.
Drift flared defensively all of a sudden. “I don’t feel guilty!”
“Then there’s no need to clamp your field down like that and make that face.”
“What face? This is just my face!”
“That expression, the one you said you don’t make all the time earlier?” Ratchet countered with a laugh.
“Whatever!” Drift shot back, and Ratchet felt a small sense of victory that he’d managed to slip under Drift’s plating, instead of Drift creeping beneath his.
Even if this journey took decades, or centuries, he wouldn’t mind.
They had plenty of their lives left.
After seemingly endless war, they could have this time together, they could treasure moments of nothing.
Moments of peace.
The simmering brew before them began to bubble, and it warmed Ratchet’s hands as they poured it out into cubes. There was more than either of them expected, enough for leftovers.
He watched it swirl in the aftermath of his stirring, cupping the cube between both hands, only to find that Drift had crept even closer to him, and was staring at his face now.
“What?”
Drift didn’t move. His stare was almost intense. “So. Are you gonna drink it?”
“Yes, I’m waiting for it to chill?” Ratchet frowned.
“Just stick it outside, it’ll freeze and recrystallize~”
“What! I’m not going to do that!”
“Well, you drink first, then. I gotta make sure it’s not poison.”
“What would you do if it was?! That sure is a way to thank me for coming out here after your sorry aft!” Nevermind, Drift was back at it, crawling under his plating with every word. He seemed to enjoy it. Still, their concoction was smooth and warm, and it had a slight tang to it going down, and it warmed Ratchet’s tanks in a comfortable way.
By the time he put his cube down, Drift was downing his in one gulp, and Ratchet resisted the urge to roll his optics.
Of course Drift was strange.
Every bot was strange. It was hard for someone to come out of the other side of millions of years of war with a fully intact processor. Cybertronians could take a physical beating and survive anything, but that didn’t protect them from the interior trauma.
Still, Ratchet didn’t mind sitting out here with Drift.
It was better than being alone.
There were worse mecha to be stuck with.
He supposed he could sit here for a few decades if he had to. The stars and the silence were a welcome change.
Drift’s field brushed against Ratchet’s own, but by now it was familiar.
~☆~
The spaceport hummed with hundreds of languages, and somehow Ratchet negotiated their way into some new parts in exchange for a few favors. Most steered clear of Cybertronians, and Drift’s smile was more off-putting than he expected.
(Ratchet was certain it wasn’t his smile, it was the swords.)
Still, Ratchet was also able to negotiate some pay for moving crates. It really just consisted of driving them from one end of the spaceport to the other, but that was an advantage of being a larger organism class than most.
He spent most of the afternoon hauling parts around for some slavagers. This also included helping to disassemble a ship that definitely didn’t belong to said salvagers, but Ratchet also knew better than to ask. He just took the credits and took off. The less he knew, the better.
If they needed to work to accrue some funds, that was fine. They had plenty of time.
Cybertronians always divided each other into factions, gave themselves insignias and titles as a need to be a part of something greater, but it was plain that no one here seemed to care if he was an Autobot. And why should they? All Cybertronians were hard-shelled war machines to most other creatures, whether they be droids, organics, or crystalline. Labels like “Autobot” and “Decepticon” didn’t mean much.
After a few days of dock work, someone asked Ratchet about his insignias. Not his Autobot insignia, but his medical ones. Admitting that he was a medic meant that he knew how to weld, and before long, he was repairing ships for a few extra credits. Local credits were worth more than shanix in this sector anyway, so Ratchet obliged. It came with free fuel anyway, and even if it was cheap, it was enough.
Ratchet found himself sitting at the edge of the shuttle bay, watching the ships that came and went. There wasn’t much here in terms of traffic, and just about every ship looked to be as terrible as their little clunker of a shuttle, but there were some blue suns in the distance that gave each retreating ship a soft glow in contrast to the red lights of the spaceport. Red LED tubing guided ships to the various docking stations, and lights cascaded in marquees in and out, surrounded by billboards for fuel, starmaps, repair bays, and restaurants (of varying quality, for varying types of organisms). Drift emerged from the shadows, magnetized his pedes to the floor, and stepped out onto the edge, staring out into space.
“What are you looking at?” Ratchet asked.
“Nothing,” Drift answered.
“Yeah, there’s a lot of that out there.”
Above them, the “FUEL” sign flickered, the symbol for “EL” flickering in and out, which, in the local language, changed the meaning to “empty.” Behind them, a sweeper droid beeped a little tune to itself as it scrubbed the floor.
“This place sucks,” Drift continued.
Ratchet didn’t look at him as he answered, taking another sip from his cube. This low grade was beyond low. It was watered down and tasted like nothing, but after running on his own reserves for so long, it was sweet and rich. “Yeah, most places do.”
“You wanna stay here for awhile?”
“Not really. But we can hang out as long as we need to.”
“Just long enough to fix up the ship and head out,” Drift stretched, taking a few paces out across the metal hull, standing perpendicular to the walkway. The distant sun silhouetted him in a faint cyan, the red lights glowing against his legs. “However long that takes. Why? You want to go back to the Lost Light? You can bail if you want.”
It was an out. An opportunity to leave, if Ratchet wanted. There was no reason to hang around this crappy spaceport in the middle of nowhere.
But was there really anywhere else to go?
Planets moving thousands of miles an hour inched by, and they continued to exist.
The faint buzz of electricity in the wires hummed around them, and the stars gazed down upon them from billions of miles away. Drift’s field lay against Ratchet’s, casual and welcome now. Ratchet said nothing of it, but his own embraced it, as if they were holding hands.
He followed Drift’s gaze. Cybertron was somewhere beyond those stars.
“I’ll leave whenever you want to. In whatever direction you pick.”