Chapter Text
When Optimus stepped through the groundbridge with a sparkling between his servos, Ratchet felt his spark offline for a nanokilk. The bitlet was not wounded, not obviously, anyway, but the sight spun Ratchet's helm all the same. It had been almost a deca-cycle since the Well had last released a sparkling, and this one looked new, its plating still gleaming in bright colours unknown to bots of old. The shade of Optimus’ chassis – one of the better looked after frames in the base – looked faded and dull in comparison to the sparkling’s paint coat, so fresh it could have transferred onto his Prime’s servos.
“Primus,” he whispered, mostly to himself as he broke into a run. Other mechs crowded in towards the bridge, shoving each other out of the way in eagerness for a look at the tiny frame Optimus carried. Excited conversation and the sound of colliding plates filled the space between Prime and medic. Ratchet made a point of whistling once sharply in response to the ruckus, a sound that was created and used by the CMO to command silence and a clear path towards an emergency situation. However, it went mostly unheeded this time, the hopeful fields of bots welcoming a new sparkling woefully undermining his authority. Using his height to look over the heads of his Autobots, Optimus locked eyes with Ratchet, and – quickly arranging the bitlet to the crook of his arm – put one servo up to stop the advancing cluster from getting any closer.
The crowd fell quiet, and pulled back several steps to give Optimus the space he had silently requested. The medic used this new peace – trying very hard not to be irritated that his own protocol had been ignored – to shove his way through the waning wall of frames. He found Optimus’ side in nanokliks, and immediately reached forward to remove the sparkling from his arms. He turned his shoulder into Optimus’ chassis, toward the now closed groundbridge to shield the bitlet from the prying eyes of the entire Autobot branch. He could allow them celebration only after he ensured all of its life-sustaining functions were, in fact, functional.
The newspark was warm to the touch and venting evenly, seemingly in recharge despite the uproar its arrival caused. Maybe overheating, Ratchet noted, the bitlet’s frame just a little too hot against his plating. Its tiny faceplate scrunched in irritation at being jostled, squirming as if to escape. Ratchet ran the tip of his digit over its forehelm to soothe it, at the same time gently leveraging the bitlet’s spark chamber open. With some coaxing, the hinge popped, and the almost textbook-perfect blue glow of a bright, healthy spark bore into Ratchet’s optics.
For almost an entire klik, he watched the spark pulse softly in time with the sparkling’s vents, its fans cycling down from erratic base-coding frame protection to a more relaxed pace. A spark comprehends safety no matter the age, Ratchet allowed a soft smile to pass over his derma. He nudged the chamber closed, consciously preserving the memory file in the back of his processor. He will die knowing that for the first time since the Decepticons ravaged Cybertron, a lifeform bought by the Allspark would be raised to be good. There would be at least one Autobot newspark of this generation, and he had touched it, tended to it. For just a nanoklik, he smugly wondered how the Decepticons were faring with newsparks throwing fits if their evil-filled fields so much as felt too close, let alone touched.
The Autobot CMO turned back, then, to give attention to the anxious faceplates staring at his backstruts. “Though I currently lack any definitive evidence,” he began, extending the sparkling into the view of the masses, “I believe the chances of survival are good.”
Excitement and joy spread through the room again at double the strength, the fields of more than a hundred bots all merging with the same emotions. Few, but numeral, bots allowed their vocoders to whoop in response, their cheers echoed by the walls of the base.
From the side, Optimus could not properly view the look on his mate’s faceplate, but the manner in which the hall fell silent told him exactly what sort of glint shone in the medic’s optics.
“Be civilised,” Ratchet hissed, even the joy of a sparkling enough to force patience onto him. “I need to get it into the scanners, get it some energon, and for Primus’ sake, some peace! You all ought to be ashamed of yourselves, truly, carrying on like that in front of a newspark.”
“We will re-evaluate the Autobot code of conduct for the presence of the sparkling momentarily,” Optimus assured both Ratchet and his supporters, pressing a servo to the space below his mate's shoulder struts. “You will all have your chance to interact with the sparkling, but for now, it is critical that we are patient until Ratchet gives us the all-clear.”
‘Go, tend to our new friend. Please keep me updated,’ Optimus asked over their shared commlink, and Ratchet didn't need to be told twice. He scurried off at double speed, keeping his pedesteps as light as possible on the way to his workstation.
—
The sparkling’s progression had been utterly remarkable, by Ratchet’s biased optics. She had turned out to be a tiny, sweet, perfectly healthy femme. The mild fever he had originally picked up on had been nothing more than a reaction to Optimus’ field in transport, so filled with static and anxiety that her poor frame had attacked itself. It was very easily treatable with a little placebo sire coding and several kliks of swaddling her in his own, more comforting field.
It had been just over half a deca-cycle since then, enough time to proudly watch her progress, and become increasingly more and more irritated by her. Over the orbital cycles, Ratchet had learnt to welcome the intrusion the newspark presented, with quite a lot of half-hearted (though often very genuine) complaints. All the way across the base, the triumphant joy of an Autobot sparkling had worn off over time, when she got loud and bothersome and somehow took up more energon ration than a fully grown mech. Not to mention, with the sparkling's quarters so purposefully close to Ratchet's own, it made for quite the grumpy medic. Recharge came in short bursts whenever the medic noticed the bitlet's optics drift offline, which also, thank the Allspark, meant her vocoder did as well. When online, she never stopped wailing, accursed binary screeching for energon, or comfort, or both. For a temperamental mech at the best of times, the bitlet made Ratchet totally insufferable to spend more than five kliks with.
Several bots found themselves cursing the newspark, in fact, but that was the price to pay for a brand new Autobot generation. The scout that had originally retrieved the sparkling from the Well had been hovering, waiting outside the medbay for joors to get Ratchet's blessing to venture inside. The bitlet always seemed relatively quiet for him, allowing him to pick her up and show her off around the base. It came to a point where Ratchet – who had not been relieved of any of his other duties even in light of the sparkling and was demonstrably in need of rest – allowed the scout to occasionally trade places with him, so as to take the bitlet’s care in shifts. For half of the stellar cycles, he took her and her tiny berth into his and his mate's barrack, much to the dismay of the other scouts.
The break was welcome, though not that Ratchet would ever admit to needing it. It meant Optimus could finally share his berth again without being disrupted; the sparkling's loud temperament in her earliest days had forced the Prime to move to a different berthroom. There had been an argument, but Ratchet would not budge on the fact that Optimus’ recharge was far more important in keeping the Autobot cause afloat than a lowly medic's, and shooed him away.
Ratchet's final break came in the form of the scout stepping into the medbay unannounced with the sparkling and his mate in tow, his field betraying a quiet anxiety that his faceplate and optics kept hidden.
“What?” Ratchet asked, swivelling to face the bot and bitlet, pedes planted firmly on the ground in preparation to rush them. “Is something wrong?”
“No, not at all, sir. She has not been recharging well, is all,” he said sheepishly, tapping his servo against her backstrut. “My conjunx and I have been discussing what might be causing her restlessness and we wanted your opinion.”
“Well?” Ratchet tried very hard not to snap. “What have you observed?”
“I- We believe that perhaps her lack of a distinctive, consistent caretaker signal has disrupted her rhythm,” the scout tells him with all the confidence of an academy student defending his poorly researched dissertation. “Our fields tend to soothe her, and you have so many other duties, it's clear that you… We thought that it might be beneficial if…”
They wanted to take her. These unbelievably selfish bots were trying to snag the sparkling for themselves…! The utter disrespect of it was almost enough to rip the word no out of Ratchet's intake simply on principle. Would they pretend to be sire and carrier, play the role of the perfect Cybertronian family? In the early stages of what was looking to be a very, very long war?
That said, she was in perfect health; her optics were bright, her spark was strong, she had no glaring issues with her frame or internals. There was no reason, no need for Ratchet to hold onto her. She didn't even particularly like him. She whined irately whenever he pulled her out of berth, when he tried to quiet his crying with his field; she wailed if he so much as vented the wrong way in her presence. The scout lit up her tiny, weak field with joy, and she recharged (as well as a newspark could) when beside his berth. On the vast majority of Ratchet's stellar cycles with her, she refused to stop screeching. Correlation, at most, he'd thought, he'd hoped. He could not be the cause of her misery, surely. He was gentle, he was patient… when he wanted to be.
Did she not deserve a true pseudocarrier, a field that felt a sire? Would he permit himself to condemn her to an incomplete life, an unstable caretaker who would never be able to truly put her first? Could he put a sparkling before his patients, before Optimus, before the war itself?
Ratchet's processor refused to provide the answer to those questions, but his spark did not know how to lie.
“Yes.”
“Yes?” The scout asked, forehelm scrunching in slight confusion. “Uh, really? You're certain?”
“Yes, I already agreed, what more do you want? Come back if she catches a bug or breaks a strut or something, but otherwise, yes, take her,” he snapped, waving a servo to dismiss the scout and his mate, the both of them wearing the same stupid, dumbfounded look on their faceplates. “You’re right in saying I am far too busy for a bitlet, so I'd much appreciate it if I could get on with some work, perhaps.”
When the bots didn’t move, Ratchet turned his back to them and huffed, “Please.”
His tone didn’t leave much room for argument. The conjunxes didn’t so much as say another word, just hurried themselves out of the medbay door, swinging it closed behind them with a soft whoosh. It clicked shut and locked, the bolt popping up into its slot in the wall, sealing Ratchet in.
The tiny sound rattled his whole frame.
___
Three stellar cycles later, Ratchet's spark still burned in his chamber. He'd hoped the bothersome ache would subside as he got stuck back into his tasks, but everything he attempted to get done felt menial and useless without balancing the sparkling on his hip strut.
The fourth solar cycle without her had come and gone, and despite his newfound ability and freedom to, Ratchet could not – rather, would not – recharge. He had not deactivated caretaker protocols, so every two joors, his HUD would beep and flash warnings at him until either they timed out, or he pointlessly got up to pretend to feed the now absent bitlet.
“They didn't even say thank you, Optimus. They even gave her a fragging designation. I had been- I'd been waiting out of courtesy to them, and see where that got me. The nanoklik they were rid of me, they turned around and… Not so much as a word of gratitude for the mech who worked through her worst orbital cycles with her– do you know how long I've been online?”
“I am sure they are grateful in their sparks, Ratchet,” Optimus replied tiredly, reaching a servo down beneath the berthsheets to find Ratchet's. Twice now this stellar cycle, his mate’s muttered annoyances had ripped him out of shallow recharge, and he was exhausted. “I can tell that you have been up for much longer than is recommended. Please, look at the positives. You can share my berth full-time again, you will be more rested, and you can divert your full focus back to the medbay. I beg you, my love, recharge.”
I'd rather have the sparkling, sat on the tip of Ratchet's glossa, but he didn't dare let the words escape. Petulance was not a good look on him; Optimus was not irate with him, not yet, but even a Prime had limited patience for this sort of senseless foolishness.
Ratchet turned his backstruts to his mate, scowling in the darkness. Optimus clearly didn't understand the gravity of giving up a bitlet, couldn’t comprehend how upset he was, didn't get what it meant.
“I have been thinking. Have you considered the possibility of imprinting?”
Optimus’ voice came as a quiet shock, the mech having fallen silent as if to allow Ratchet to stew in his bitterness, as per usual when he was in this sort of mood. The words out of his conjunx's intake were far from unkind, but they stung like a fresh slap. At least, at first. A nanoklik later, Ratchet's processor caught up, finally, to realise that Optimus was proposing a solution, an answer that had evaded him thus far, that didn't involve his own failure as a caretaker.
In response, Ratchet rolled onto his back plate, a silent sign that he was listening.
“The first bot a newspark comes into contact with outside of the Well often becomes their caretaker, as I know you're aware,” the Prime continued, his optics warmer than they had been before. “You must remember, Ratchet, neither you nor I were the first mechs to touch her. She finds more comfort in our friend's field than yours because that is her coding. Her processor is not mature enough to change or decide between caretakers. I sincerely hope you are not upset that you were not chosen, for it was never her choice to make.”
The medic's servo found his Prime's, accepting the comfort he’d offered kliks ago, yet never rescinded. He took a deep vent in, and expelled it in the form of an angry sigh.
“You know how much I hate it when you're right,” he said, defeated and without any real irritation. “Fragging imprinting, how could I… this stupid war has corrupted my damn processor.”
“You are clever and compassionate beyond reason, my love,” half-lucid, Optimus reached for his mate to wrap him in an embrace. “All will heal, in time. For now, let us rejoice in each other’s company. There has been an emptiness to my berth as of late that I am overjoyed to see you once again fill.”
Unable to argue with that, Ratchet offlined his optics, just for a klik, just to appease his mate.