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A medic’s hands were one of the world’s unexplainable marvels. They could transform into more tools than any other type of Cybertronian model, and the variations between each medical specialty meant an even greater array of uniqueness. Forged medic hands were deemed superior to cold-constructed medic hands not only because of that special gift, but also because of their unique function of revealing a medic’s death count.
When a medic failed to save a life, their hand lost a bit of its colour. A chip here and there would expose a grey surface underneath, one that couldn’t be repaired by one’s own systems. It could be painted over, but the paint wouldn’t last long. That was also why a medic’s hand colour couldn’t change even through repaints; the hands would always retain the original colour they were sparked with.
Scientists never fully understood why this phenomenon occurred; it was simply one that was accepted as part of a medic’s function.
When Ratchet heard First Aid’s explanation of how Pharma had done all of this, he’d been skeptical.
“You said the two Decepticons were monoformers, but look! They had transformation cogs!” First Aid held up the evidence—one cleanly removed t-cog. Pharma wore a bewildered expression.
“So I misread the scanner!” He retorted.
“And you said they attacked you—but all your injuries have been caused by a laser scalpel. Your laser scalpel. Your wounds are self-inflicted.”
Pharma balked. “Ratchet—buddy—you don’t believe this, do you?” He extended his arms, shaking his hands. “See? My hands are still blue! There’s no way I could have done this! You know what happens when we lose a life on the line!”
Ratchet saw what he saw—blue hands. That familiar Pharma blue, that had never seen a day of grey due to Pharma’s impeccable track record as a surgeon. Mystical as the ways of a medic’s hand colour was, it had always been another medic who’d lost some colour in their hands when there were multiple surgeons working on a patient. Ratchet could only begin to wonder what entity decided who was at fault for the death of a patient.
But the logic didn’t add up the more he listened to the excuses. The missing t-cogs from the monoformers. The self-inflicted scalpel wounds. The refusal to transform.
It all culminated to him watching those blue hands go limp as they were separated from the jet’s body.
It was his hands aching from the biting chill of Messatine that forced his hand. He retrieved the amputated hands, set on his goal.
But when he pulled the hands from his subspace to prepare to have them attached to his body, he was shocked to find them as they were. That wasn’t supposed to be. They weren’t supposed to be blue still.
Every Cybertronian who went offline permanently became grey over time as the nanites responsible for maintaining their paint job died. The symbiotic relationship was the reason why mechs could go through terrible amounts of surface-level damage yet still have a clean, continuous paint job after a week without any intervention.
Why then were these hands blue?
Ratchet’s spark panged painfully with a horrible thought that crossed his mind. He didn’t hold on to it, wanting it to be a silly, ill-conceived idea. He held one in his hand, vents pausing in their cycling as he picked at the blue hand with one of his fingers. Scrape, scrape, scrape…
The evidence stared back at him. The blue flaked off, revealing the grey truth underneath. Normally, a Cybertronian’s paint shouldn’t come off so easily under a little bit of worrying from a finger picking at it. He kept scraping and scraping at those servos, trying to find one surface that wasn’t grey, hoping there was a part of that blue that would refuse to peel, even though, logically, he knew that a dead body part would have no blue at all. The flakes fluttered gently to the clean ground of the med bay. Their landing was quiet, but the painful reality was a roar in his audials.
Grey covered every surface, right down to the wrists. The only colour remaining on those hands was pink from Pharma’s own dried energon. How many times had Pharma washed these hands where spilled energon was the only thing giving his hands colour?
He’d wanted to believe Pharma had been telling the truth, that even though everything except the blue made sense, the hands would sustain Pharma’s innocence.
He’d never seen a medic with entirely grey hands—with the exception of some general surgeon named Knock Out, who was found to be intentionally killing his patients to syphon their innermost energon for the black market. The change in colour wasn’t immediately noticeable because Knock Out’s original hand colour was a value slightly darker in grey than the dead grey that all medic hands took on when they failed to save another life.
Ratchet now had a difficult decision to make. Keep his mostly red hands, decrepit as they were—even though it would sign the end of his life career sooner or later… or wear the functional grey hands of a much younger mech. The hands of a murderer.
He could paint the hands, but the nanites on medic hands weren’t the same as the nanites anywhere else on the body. The nanites wouldn’t take to new paint. The paint would begin flaking off eventually, and one would have to keep painting their hands for the rest of their life, potentially causing them scandals and shame if someone found out their dirty little secret. Medics were specifically trained during their training years not to feel ashamed for the colour of their hands, that some loss of colour was a part of life. It didn’t define you.
How much paint had Pharma gone through? He wondered how long Pharma had been hiding his secrets for. If Pharma had continued working indefinitely at Delphi, eventually the jet would’ve ran out of his blue paint and needed to import more, which would be evidenced on a list of imported materials to Messatine, which could have exposed him in the end when one connected that with the sheer amount of deaths at Delphi. Did Pharma just make a mistake in his planning, or did he not predict that he’d have much left of a future? These thoughts weighed on Ratchet’s mind for longer than he desired.
.o
Ratchet stared down into his glass of engex, watching the vibrant colours cast from the lights of Swerve’s bar dance in the murky reflection of his swill. Blue and yellow spun as he twirled his glass to see more of it sparkle.
An out –of-place red dot found itself on the liquid surface. He wasn’t sure when it had gotten there. His optics cast a glance of where it came from—a small chip on his index finger exposed offline grey, a haunting reminder of what these hands had done.
He shuttered his optics, willing his spark not to hurt in reminiscence—he’d gotten over it. He wouldn’t allow any more time for tears to be shed.
He shifted his attention away from his drink to the animated individuals enjoying their own energon. He spent the rest of his time watching people who were still alive. People who he’d saved both with his original hands and these new ones.
These new hands changed nothing but the amount of time he had left to serve his life’s function. It didn’t change that his spark knew how many he’d lost, how many he’d saved. There were medics with mostly-grey servos who saved more lives than he ever had, and slag, they were heroes. What mattered was the bot behind the hands. All hands were grey in the right visual wavelength.