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First Aid stared at the box before him. A small metallic case, silver, with no other discernible features, had been sat upon his desk. The lid was open with the contents exposed. Inside, the case was lined with a soft, black material along the top and bottom portions, carefully cradling two appendages between them.
Two hands.
Not just any hands, of course, but familiar reddish, almost faded to orange hands. The paint had been kept immaculate for many years but now there were small scratches, minuscule kinks and chips in the paint, revealing an ominous blue underneath. The color stuck out immediately to his optics and he felt a small shiver run down his spinal strut.
“So…he didn’t want them?” First Aid asked, optics bouncing back and forth between the hands and the courier mech who’d delivered the case and had stood there ever since. Not waiting for an answer, his optics quickly sprung back down to the hands permanently, as if they’d spring to life and start to move about of their own accord if he dared to look away for too long. Beneath his face mask, the freshly appointed CMO of the Autobots ran his glossa over his derma, wetting the suddenly too dry material.
“No sir. I made contact with Whirl earlier and he has refused ownership. Due to the arrangement established by the previous CMO, Ratchet of Vaporex, in the event that Whirl refuses ownership, the hands are to be brought to the current CMO to do with as he sees fit. Seeing as you are now our CMO, I’ve brought them to you.” The mech fastidiously explained, a clearly rehearsed speech created from the specifics of his orders. As he spoke, the courier pulled a datapad from under his arm and presented it to First Aid, showcasing Whirl’s signature for the refusal as well as the original agreement in a separate window.
“Alright then…” First Aid said quietly, his voice almost a whisper, as he grabbed the lip of the box gingerly with the tip of a single digit and slowly drug it closer to him, “I’ll um…I’ll see if any medics are in need of replacement hands then.” He stammered out, each word tumbling from his intake like the unsure first steps of a sparkling. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to help someone in need, not at all, but these hands…could he really re-distribute these hands?
As his mind flooded with ideas, swirling around and mixing in to a confusing tangle, he absentmindedly signed off on the datapad after the courier presented it to him again. With everything settled, the courier bot took his leave, closing the door behind him and leaving First Aid to his thoughts.
Giving them away would undoubtedly be the easy thing to do. There would always be a medic in need of a hand replacement, whether they were suffering from overuse issues like Ratchet had or had injured themselves in some way, shape or form.
He could send the hands to be soaked, have the paint thinned away little by little until they were gray. That might assuage his hesitation a little bit. If they didn’t look like that, if they weren’t that shade of blue, then maybe he could forget that these hands had once belonged to Pharma of Iacon.
Pharma had been his old boss back on Messatine. The two of them, along with another bot named Ambulon, had been stationed there back during the war. They’d spent a plethora of boring cycles there, each one slower and more unfulfilling than the last, as they worked on the injuries of the miners in the nearby nucleon mines. He’d been stationed there at least five stellar-cycles before the trouble began.
He could recall it like it was yesterday. Suddenly, things hadn’t added up. Supplies were running short, too many patients had either gone missing or had died unexpectedly…First Aid had gone looking, tracing down every single oddity he could find. While he hadn’t been the one to finger Pharma as the culprit, he had been the one to blow the whistle and alert Ratchet and the others to everything that was happening.
He’d been angry at first. Who wouldn’t be? He’d been lied to, betrayed, talked down to and treated like he was expendable. He’d been so angry with Pharma at the time he’d agreed to Ratchet’s plans to leave Pharma where he fell, leave him to his fate. That had obviously backfired when the bot reappeared, alive and well, on Luna-1 where he went on to kill Ambulon and later laugh about it. That had been what pushed First Aid over the edge. He’d wanted to take Pharma down already, despite everything Ratchet had said, but that had forced his hand in the end. He’d shot Pharma, point blank, destroyed almost his entire helm. Decapitation.
So many emotions, so many memories, so many…things…
It had taken him to time to accept the reality he’d been a part of creating. Ambulon was dead. Pharma was dead now too, and missing. He was the last living member of the former Delphi Outpost. With Rung’s help, he’d accepted the fact that it wasn’t his fault, that he shouldn’t feel guilty for surviving, and that he should keep living to honor their memories.
After all, it wasn’t Pharma’s fault any of that happened either. It was Tarn’s. The Decepticon Justice Division was the problem. They’d tortured Pharma. They’d cut him off from his allies, made him feel helpless and alone, like he had no choice but to agree to their sick and twisted game. He hadn’t understood that right away, and had even been complicit in healing two of their members which resulted in even more deaths…but now he knew.
First Aid still felt conflicted about Pharma, but didn’t blame him for Delphi. That much he knew at least.
When everything was finished, when the dust had finally settled, he gave up trying to bring Ambulon back. After seeing Pharma reappear from his supposed ‘first death’, and then reappear a second time as a sort of remnant, possessed by a supposed god before he’s been blown to smithereens, he’d abandoned the idea. Even he felt sorry seeing Pharma’s frame being treated that way. Pharma had technically died twice, three if you took Ratchet’s stance back at Delphi, that Pharma had died a long time ago before they’d ever intervened. It wasn’t right to keep forcing a mech to live, to bring a tortured spark like that back over and over again.
Ambulon hadn’t deserved to die, but he did deserve to rest. Pharma did too.
After everything they’d been through, they all deserved a rest.
First Aid closed the lid of the box.
Bright and early, he’d taken Pharma’s hands to a specialist. He asked for the orange-ish, red paint to be removed, but to leave the blue underneath untouched. It would take a few hours to remove the various coats Ratchet had applied over the stellar-cycles past, multiple touch-ups to avoid chipping or holes in the paint despite his best efforts.
He’d left Pharma’s hands to the specialist, returning hours later when the work was done. The former CMO’s hands gleamed in the overhead light. The golden accents on the back of his hands had been polished to a near blinding state. First Aid knew Pharma wasn’t the type to primp and polish, but he did like to appear professional and clean. Surely this would meet the former CMO’s approval.
Returning the hands back to their box, First Aid thanked the mech, paid them for their work, and took his leave. While he’d waited for the work to be done, he’d taken care of a few other errands, specifically finding a place for Pharma’s hands.
Pharma had been an Autobot. Still was, to some. Had he been able to receive counseling, hadn’t been found by Tyrest, hadn’t been twisted and warped even further…he might still be with them today. Maybe not as a doctor, but here. That would have been enough. With enough time and training and improvement, maybe he could be trusted again.
But there was no reason to be pondering the ‘ifs’ and ‘maybes’.
The only thing he could do now was put Pharma to rest.
After a short trip, he arrived. Instead of taking a shuttle, he’d driven to the spot just outside the city limits in his ambulance mode. The box with Pharma’s hands had been safely settled in to the driver’s seat, a belt over the box to keep it from sliding around he as he traveled. The place wasn’t far, after all, the resting place for mechs lost in the war had grown quickly and spread out over a large area. The last time he’d been here was for Ratchet’s burial, and First Aid would have sworn it had grown even bigger since then.
Traveling further in, he slowed to a stop in front of a lone marker on a slightly raised portion of ground. He had picked this spot stellar-cycles ago. Couldn’t exactly explain why, but when asked he finally admitted that it had just seemed right.
Mechs like Ratchet got statues for their accolades, but not everyone. Others got simple markers with their names and designations. The marker here stood virtually alone save for a small placeholder to the left of it, intended to one day have a marker of its own – his own. The current read ‘Ambulon of Operation Split Infinity’ while the placeholder simply read ‘Reserved’.
“Well, this is the place.” First Aid said quietly, keeping his voice low in case anyone was nearby as he stood in front of the marker. He didn’t need or want anyone thinking he’d gone crazy which they undoubtedly would if they saw him talking to a grave marker and a pair of hands. Not to mention the scandal it would probably cause if someone found out he was burying medic hands.
“Sorry I haven’t been by lately Ambulon, been a little busy with all the CMO stuff. I think I’ve finally gotten everything transferred over from Ratchet so hopefully I’m good.” He knew there wouldn’t be an answer, didn’t expect one, “Before you get mad, I wanted to tell you that there is a reason I’m doing this. I can’t…I’ll never know exactly how you felt, how you’d still feel if you were online, but I hope you’ve forgiven Pharma. It’s not easy to do, trust me, some days I’m still angry with him and wish I could punch him one last time, believe me.”
The silence of the scrapyard was practically palpable as a fresh breeze blew.
“But you heard the story, some of it. The Decepticon Justice Division took Pharma from us. Maybe there was a right answer, maybe there was something else he should have done at Delphi but…guess we’ll never know. At least the DJD can’t hurt anyone anymore.”
He paused for a moment, wanting to say he could take solace in that as a medic but that wouldn’t bring back the mechs they’d killed.
“Anyways, long story short…I brought Pharma.” First Aid paused only for a second, just long enough to lift the box up, “Ratchet made a promise to Whirl that after he was gone, Whirl could have the hands. They’re probably the closest thing he’d get to having his old hands back, short of having the real ones of course. Honestly really surprised that Whirl refused them though, bu I’m glad he did. These weren’t Ratchet’s to give away.” First Aid said, his easy-going tone finally taking a dip towards bitterness.
No matter how he’d felt about Pharma in the beginning, he’d never approved of Ratchet stealing Pharma’s hands. It wasn’t right. Especially after the bot was found to be alive on Luna-1. He’d even introduced Ratchet to Velocity as “the hand thief”. It may have been immature and an obvious jab at Ratchet, but First Aid had felt it was deserved. After all, even the universe itself knew those hands hadn’t belonged to Ratchet, aptly leaving them behind when the medic had disappeared during the event with the Alternate Lost Light.
“That said, I brought him here. I think a lot of people got the wrong idea about Pharma, made him out to be this horrible mad doctor who’d been “hiding in plain sight all along” but it wasn’t like that. But because of that, finding someone to make a marker for him has been a little rough.” First Aid explained, his hidden derma pulling in to a frown as he recalled the various mechs who’d turned him down once he mentioned the marker would be for Pharma. Even the ones who didn’t recognize him at first quickly connected the dots and remembered him as the ‘mad doctor’ who’d turned on Ratchet and nearly killed their beloved CMO.
“But no worries, right Pharma?” First Aid asked, this time addressing the box in his hand rather than the marker, “Think I have a solution that will make everyone happy.”
Moving from in front of Ambulon’s marker, First Aid placed the box on the ground in front of the ‘Reserved’ sign and outlined plot of his own future site. Using the measurements there, he moved further left of his own and dropped to his knee joints. The ground was soft, pliable, and he could easily work his hands in to the metallic soil. The grit moved easily enough, parting further with each drag and scoop of his hands. Another thing someone would accost him for – a medic probably shouldn’t be digging in the dirt with their bare hands but it wasn’t like he had anything else. It probably would have better if he’d brought a shovel, but no point in lamenting that now.
He moved the soil far enough down until he was certain the box would fit. His white hands had become soiled with grime, and his red fingers had darkened. Grabbing the box off to his right, First Aid slowly placed the box in the hole. Nope, needed to be a bit wider. He removed the box and moved a bit of the soil around further until it was a perfect fit.
Maybe it would have been better to place Pharma’s hands in his spot, but that might cause problems in the Afterspark. Besides, making everyone happy, right? That was the plan.
Slowly, he worked the pliable soil back over the box, smoothing and straightening the mould, pounding it slightly until it was flat again. The metallic nature of the soil should firm back up, hardening enough so that it would take special tools to disturb if anyone ever tried to do so. Made this place perfect for a scrapyard.
Dusting off his hands, First Aid glanced around. His optics scanned the nearby ground, only looking for objects not explicitly meant for someone else’s marker. Finally, he settled on a large enough rock and went to retrieve it. Using his laser scalpel, he slowly and meticulously began to carve a message in to the rock face.
He wrote ‘Pharma of Iacon’, then held it at a distance to admire his handiwork. After thinking for a moment, he went below the inscription and wrote ‘CMO of Delphi’. Had he survived, not been manipulated, Pharma would be CMO right now instead of him. It only seemed right that he still hold that title in some regard now.
Placing the rock at the head of the mound, First Aid replaced the scalpel, dusted his hands off once more, then stood back to admire the view. Pharma and Ambulon had both finally been laid to rest. The Delphi medics were almost together again. Hopefully there were no hard feelings between the two of them in the Afterspark. The thought of them squabbling over something so minor brought forth a small laugh from his derma.
This was cathartic.
Rung had been right. Of course, he was always right though wasn’t he? Primus couldn’t be wrong.
Letting go hadn’t been easy. It never was. But at the very least he could do this.
“I’ll keep trying to get a marker, Pharma. I know you’d never let me hear the end of it otherwise.” First Aid laughed, the noise dying away to a vent.
“I’ll try to be a good CMO, for all of us, you know? I don’t want to make the same mistakes Ratchet did.” It was a natural worry, not another jab at Ratchet. He didn’t expect to be perfect of course, but he wanted to try and be better, improve however he could.
No time like the present.
“See you later, Ambulon. Goodbye, Pharma.”