Chapter Text
He always functioned best with a goal, a task to accomplish. Keeping his servos busy allowed his processor time to rise above the depths of the mines, past carbon and tonnes of stone, the crushed husks of miners before him, abandoned to shafts and chambers deemed too dangerous to retrieve them from. While centuries of experience allowed his servos to unerringly guide the pickaxe and the drill around pockets of granite and volatile veins, his mind climbed higher, past the shackles they were sparked with but could not see.
Even he’d been blind to the true extent of their chains.
The poetry D-16 composed had been an escape, a refuge he shared with no other for the first millenia of his functioning, murmured and recited in the deep dark while those around him sang old miners' dirges, passed down from frame to frame. His servos would tremble in the aftermath, the litanies reverberating in his helm, urging the words up from his spark to his processor to his mouth, where they choked him—
And I saw a servo grasping for mine,
Gone still,
Buried in His stone flesh.
—until brilliant, eager optics and gentle servos just as scarred as his own pressed a contraband datapad into his grasp, a warm voice murmuring close, “Your words are beautiful, Dee. But I shouldn’t be the only one to hear them.”
No tomb for the devout
Children without number,
A patina of rust for a shroud,
And His blood is our reward?
A stolen datapad and a false ID chit later, and D-16 possessed the same access to the holo grid that every cogged bot was given when they came online. His writings resided in those recesses and hidden corners, anonymous, lest he bring the wrath of their overseers down on his head.
In the barracks, his words were passed along by the miners who specialized in contraband, and perhaps they even clawed their way up the levels into gleaming Iacon above them. He certainly wrote enough poems to flood his little pocket of the grid. Though D-16 hadn’t posted anything new in some time.
Flaring, flickering, fading had been his inspiration of late.
Why rise,
Only to fall,
Fall into dark pits where Death dwells
And insists Peace lies instead.
“D-16.”
“Dee—”
“Hey, Dee!”
A servo clapped onto D-16’s pauldron, jolting him back to his frame.
Only his newly integrated medic protocols prevented him from instinctively lashing out with a fist, as he might have in the past. But soon the protocols wouldn’t be a leash so much as a new rung on his personality matrix, a natural progression. Or so he hoped.
He looked down, and instead of a powered drill in his servos there was a cleaning cloth and a scalpel, one out of a carefully organized row of medical tools. Chagrinned, he realized he couldn’t remember how long he’d been standing in this corner, disinfecting the same tool over and over. Consulting his chronometer was of little help.
D-16 set down both items before turning to Ratchet, silently grateful to have been given a few kliks to reorient himself. He recognized the walls of the clinic now, the lingering tang of spilled energon and the sharper scent of disinfectant in the air.
He nearly faltered again at the reminder that he had to look down to meet Ratchet’s shrewd gaze now.
Of all the astonishing changes to his frame that his t-cog had given him, his newfound height took perhaps the most getting used to. As cogless miners there had been little variation between them in that regard. Even if D-16 had a few inches on some of his fellows, it meant little when they were collectively shorter than any mini-bot.
Ratchet had been all but a permanent fixture in the mines through his free clinic, and his reputation was such that his superiors at Iacon Central Med were willing to look the other way regarding his charitable works and amusing political beliefs.
For all that Ratchet’s naturally forged medic build was still broader than his, D-16 now had a helm of height over the medic, which was disconcerting for a number of reasons. Least of all because, until a few orbital cycles ago, he’d had to crane his helm back to meet Ratchet’s optics for his entire functioning.
“That was our last patient,” Ratchet said.
D-16 bobbed his helm, something like relief easing through his lines. The last bot came by with a torn rotator case—they’d chosen repair over replacement, and D-16 was trusted with the welds. He couldn’t have been distracted long if Ratchet just discharged them.
“Will I be following you to Central Med?”
Ratchet scoffed, rolling his optics with his entire frame. “Not this solar cycle. I have an appointment with some mid-grade and my long lost berth.”
“I don’t mind assisting First Aid,” D-16 replied. Judging by his chronometer, the junior medic should be arriving any klik now to begin his shift.
“You misunderstand.” He prodded D-16’s silver chestplate with a red index finger, more terrifying than a gun barrel. “You’ve already worked overtime with me. Go home, get a good defrag in.”
D-16 realized his servos were clenching into fists when his HUD pinged him with an alert for stressed tensor joints. With an exvent, he focused on relaxing his servos at his sides. It took longer than he’d like to admit.
“Ratchet,” he gritted out. “I don’t mind. If I can assist First Aid—”
“I didn’t realize First Aid had taken over your schooling,” Ratchet steamrolled over him, unrepentant. “What a relief! That certainly frees up my schedule.”
“Ratchet,” D-16 tried again, and on hearing his vocalizer crackle with the beginnings of desperation, ruthlessly offlined it.
Releasing a gusty exvent of his own, Ratchet reached up with some effort to grip the back of D-16’s neck, shaking him gently. “Keeping busy is one thing, but you’re a medic now. We’re nothing but busy, too fragging busy, and when someone tells us it’s alright to keel over and get some recharge in, we do so. You hear me, kid?” Ratchet shook him again, smirk turning wry. “Y’know, I seem to remember this being a lot easier when you were half my height.”
D-16 also remembered pulling double and even triple shifts not even a stellar cycle ago in far worse conditions than a cushy Dead End clinic, but he refrained from reminding Ratchet since he liked his helm where it was.
“You mean back when you could push me around?” D-16 allowed the fight to leave his frame with a crackle of circuits and a great heave of his vents. A stubborn, stupid part of him urged him to keep arguing, but going up against the Hatchet would just net him a hoarse vocalizer and banishment from the clinic for half an orbital cycle.
Ratchet scoffed, releasing D-16 with a swat to the helm. “As if anyone could ever push you around.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Now get outta here, I bet Jazz is already waiting.”
D-16 felt his lingering irritation at Ratchet redirect itself, barely quieting his engine before a snarl could escape.
“Right,” he bit out, his plating already bristling. “Night, Ratchet.”
“Night, kid.”
With Ratchet already turning away, D-16 allowed himself to scowl as he marched for the entrance. He stormed through the doors and the muggy air of the Dead End during third shift greeted him as he halted in the doorway, just shy of the portal sliding shut behind him.
For all that high caste mechs seemed to write the Dead End off as a dark pit at the fringe of Iacon, D-16 knew true darkness; these dingy streets were not it. Glow lamps had been newly introduced, dotting the road every dozen feet, and rehabilitation centers had been constructed under Ratchet’s direction (as well as a few other medibots and civic-minded civilians) for syk and circuit booster addicts.
Under one such lamp was what drew his present ire: a visored, door-winged silver and black mech, leaning against the pole and singing quietly to himself, too faint to be caught on the scant breeze that filtered between the narrow, tightly packed buildings.
Jazz noticed him at once, raising his helm with a wink of his visor.
“There you are! What, did ol’ Ratch have you chained to the floor?”
D-16 turned his back and began striding down the street in the opposite direction from Jazz, his long legs eating up the distance.
He heard Jazz sputter with laughter behind him, grating on his audials and making his shoulders hitch without his say-so. D-16 didn’t turn or slow, even as he heard Jazz slip into vehicle mode behind him, speedster engine strangely muffled. Perk of being a spy, or whatever it was he did for the new government that swore him to secrecy.
D-16 didn’t have the luxury of transforming here—not enough room.
Jazz caught up to him, as he always did. He zoomed around D-16, turning a masterful skid into a twirling transformation. “Hey!” he said, already laughing even before his helm emerged. “Where’s the fire—?”
D-16 walked past him.
Unfortunately, Jazz anticipated that and was already jogging to keep up. “Rude, my mech. I think you've been spending a little too much time with Ratchet if you’re taking his berthside manner to spark!”
He couldn’t transform and leave Jazz in his vapor trails until he reached the plaza at the end of the road. He did the next best thing by growling at him.
“I had a pretty good shift, thanks for asking,” Jazz replied with a flick of his doorwings, turning to walk backwards beside him. His replacement leg moved smoothly, without so much as a hitch in his gait; D-16 would never have guessed it wasn’t factory-issued if he hadn’t slapped the temp plating on himself. “Wheeljack managed to get away from Shockwave for a few joors to visit Prowl and me at Metro. He’s doing good. Better than.” His visor remained unerringly locked on D-16’s faceplates, waiting for some kind of response.
D-16 wasn’t willing to give him the satisfaction.
“You should come out for drinks with us some time,” Jazz said confidently even when it became clear that D-16 wasn’t going to contribute. “The old crew would love to see you for real, not just when they’re half stasis-locked in the medbay. We wanna hear all about how your training’s going! Ratchet’s got nothing but glowing compliments, from what I hear.”
D-16 scoffed quietly, but though he’d deny it until his deactivation, beneath the heavy plating of his chassis, his spark pulsed with pride. There was nothing quite so satisfying as a job done well. They shouldn’t have been forced into the mines, with no choice but to bleed and die at the whim of a power mad coward (betrayer, False Prime, liar, murderer—), but it was what he’d been created for, and he’d been one of the best. Few achieved Tier 7, and he nearly made supervisor. He was a medic-in-training now, but that would change too.
“Y’know 84’s? Our little corner of paradise?” Jazz pestered eagerly.
Oh, he remembered. Few businesses tolerated no-cogs, for all that their scrip spent the same, which made 84’s a rare haven for miners looking to get well and truly blitzed. Nevermind that the walls and counters were permanently sticky and stained, the cheap high grade on tap cloudy and diluted, and the walls so littered with holes (whether from fists or ancient blasterfire was anyone’s guess) that you could see out onto the street through some of them.
Being in there had practically given Red Alert fits, and he’d insist that the mining guild owned the bar as a way to siphon their profits out of the miners’ accounts faster than they could be deposited. Obviously, he’d been right.
“Well, some mini-bot snatched it up! Turned the whole place around.”
D-16 grunted. “One of us?”
Less than a block to the plaza, then he could escape this conversation.
Jazz shrugged, doorwings fluttering. “Nah, not a miner. But Swerve knows his clientele, he isn’t trying to turn it into some uppity Towers hangout. You only work second shift tomorrow, right? How about we meet up again and head there together?”
“I don’t need an escort,” D-16 muttered, plating bristling. His ire reignited all too easily, churning within him like a second spark, searing him from within.
“Course ya don’t,” Jazz replied lightly.
And yet he was still assigned one most nights, and always when he worked third shift.
Since they emerged whole from the mines for the first and final time, a consensus had been made behind his back that he could not be trusted on his own, that he must be coddled, like a newbuild who toddled straight off the factory line and down an open mine shaft. They never said as much, but if it wasn’t Jazz waiting for him outside Ratchet’s clinic or Metroplex’s medbay, it was Prowl, or Arcee, Ironhide—
D-16 scoffed furiously, the sound catching in his vocalizer and replaced with a snarl of his engine instead. Oh, but he was tired of being talked around tonight, made to feel as though his opinions and wants were frivolous and stupid.
“Save your pity, Jazz. I don’t need it,” he ground out, trembling under the force of his impotent overwhelm and rage.
“It’s not pity to care about someone.”
They’d reached the end of the street, and the circular plaza lay before them with its ground of cobbled metal gleaming pale blue under the lamps. D-16 could leave now, and Jazz would not be able to follow. But he stopped instead.
“Whatever you call it, I don’t need it. I’m not some defective mining bot with his spark hanging by a thread! I can take care of myself by myself, and If I want to be alone, training until my gears strip or the Quints take me, then let me be alone.”
D-16 realized, perhaps belatedly, that he was looming over Jazz, his shadow subsuming the smaller bot. He cycled his next intake, his vents coughing awkwardly from the strain, and stepped back and out of range of the other mech’s field.
“All I care about now is becoming a medic,” he finished lamely.
Jazz’s visor didn’t even flicker, unphased by D-16’s snarling in his face like some wounded mechanimal. D-16 knew how to read his expressions through the visor, or he had, back before whatever training Jazz had undergone with Soundwave’s tutelage allowed him to craft masks over bare protoform, obscuring his true feelings from D-16’s sight.
When Jazz’s pauldron’s slumped, allowing himself to be small and young, D-16’s junior by a decivorn, it was a conscious surrender.
The pained pinch to his mouth was more familiar to D-16 from processor-numbing, strut-rending triple shifts in the mines, the wrench of a crushed leg severed at the knee.
“Dee…D-16,” Jazz immediately corrected himself when he saw his plating start to ripple again. “All this you’re doing to yourself…You know he’d be proud of you, right? No matter what.”
Agony bloomed in the center of his spark where it never quite abated, a corona of grief that spread outward through his lines in a freezing rush. It came as a shock every time, the wound torn anew, painful as the joor it was inflicted. His spark pulsed and his frame ached in commiseration.
He turned his back on Jazz, and all that he reminded him of. Without another word, D-16 transformed and took to the air.