Chapter Text
Ambulon came online in an unfamiliar room.
His processor jolted to life with a host of frantic questions. Where was he? Where were his gestalt mates? What was happening to him? Wild scenarios raced through his mind, each more horrific than the next. Every mechanism in his body froze. Gotta come up with a strategy. Gotta escape. When will this be over? Oh please…
His sensors scrambled to take in his surroundings. There was something heavy wrapped around his chest. Restraints? Fuel pump hammering, he powered up his optics and glanced down.
It was an arm. A white arm. With blue hands, and a stupid wing and vent attached to the shoulder.
Some of the tension bled from Ambulon’s frame. He cancelled his self-diagnostic reports. Okay, so it definitely wasn't as bad as waking up in an experimental Decepticon lab, but…ugh. Pharma's berth. Again.
Memory files from the previous night booted. Ambulon cringed. That's right, he had stopped by Pharma's habsuite to drop off some reports, telling himself he'd leave immediately afterwards. “Immediately afterwards” never happened.
Another evening of meticulously shameful overloads did.
Recently, every other night saw Ambulon violating a new personal tenet. At first it was not to act on his attraction to his pompous aft of a boss. Then he swore he wouldn't engage in actual interfacing with aforementioned aft. Finally he told himself, and he was really serious this time, that no matter what, he wouldn’t spend the night sleeping next to the gorgeous fragger.
This would make the third time he'd fallen into recharge next to Pharma, dangerously close to something like a habit. Now he was at the part where he wanted to get away. Right on schedule.
There’s still boundaries left, he told himself. Fragging doesn’t mean anything. Hell, it’s not like we’ve shared spark energy.
Ambulon eyed the door. It was so close. If he managed to slip out of Pharma's possessive grasp and cross the little room, he'd be free. For a little while, anyway. Just gotta get out that door. No problem. He'd escaped from worse situations.
Steeling himself, Ambulon slid his fingers under Pharma’s forearm and lifted it with a strength belying his smaller frame. He held the arm steady in the air and shimmied off the berth as quietly as he could.
Pharma muttered something that sounded suspiciously like “not now, Ratchet.” A hiss from his wing hydraulics slashed through the thick silence in the room.
Ambulon stopped. Frag. Every scrape of metal sounded like a thundering cannon, but the jet slept on, so he gently placed the arm back on the berth. Foregoing all dignity, he took a delicate little step towards the door. Then another. Then another.
He slunk away from the berth, optics trained on his escape hatch. His mouth went dry. Soon he could slip back to his own room. Or visit the wash racks. Or do any number of things in the blessed peace and quiet before his shift started and he and Pharma could go back to being irritated colleagues, rather than irritated lovers.
But just as he was about to cross the threshold that would trigger the door to open, the universe proved to Ambulon that, once again, escape wasn’t for the faint of spark.
"Ambulon," came the voice from the berth, dripping with amusement and fake hurt. "Leaving so soon?"
Spawn of a glitch. Go now!
The thought had no real power. Years of working for Pharma had conditioned Ambulon to respond. He turned with his head held high, yet when their optics met, it was impossible to stop the churning in his fuel lines.
Pharma was stretched out on the berth, perfect paint job gleaming. One hand rested casually behind his head. The other stroked his cockpit glass. A half smile graced his handsome face, one with no real warmth behind it.
He looked sexy. Ambulon hated it.
"I've…uh…gotta get ready for my shift."
"You do," said Pharma. "We have a big day today." He motioned with one of his dexterous fingers. "Come here."
"I should really-"
"Ambulon." The false mirth fled from Pharma’s tone, replaced with that hard edge. The one that sent nurses scrambling. "Come. Here."
Before he could stop himself, Ambulon’s feet relieved his mind from the burden of rationalization and took the short, shameful steps back to the berth. This was all part of the power game. He tried to leave, so Pharma would make him stay. If he had tried to stay and have some sort of demented snuggle time, Pharma would be kicking him out right now.
He didn't have to obey. Pharma couldn’t order him into the berth. He only took what Ambulon gave willingly. Lately though, Ambulon found that the more power Pharma took from him, the more he wanted to give it up. It was dirty and humiliating and it felt good. A blessed relief. Like someone had lifted a huge weight from his shoulders.
With a fleeting thought of the door, Ambulon sat next to Pharma. He forced himself to make eye contact, spark whirling madly in its chamber.
"I'm thinking of instituting a new procedure for neurex saturation." Pharma took Ambulon's left hand and rubbed little circles into his palm. "I don't like how you and First Aid have been mixing it."
Ambulon's fans hitched. "Y-you're kidding, right? We've been mixing it the way you instructed."
"Obviously you both need a written procedure, because no, you haven't." Pharma continued to stroke Ambulon's fingers. "Your saturation levels are at forty percent. I instructed thirty-eight. That's the optimal level for self-repair functions. Also, your mixing station is filthy."
Electric arrows shot from Ambulon's hand throughout his whole body, igniting a fiery throb in his core. He gripped the edge of the berth with his free hand. "Filthy? We clean it every night."
"Clean? By whose definition?" Despite his bored expression, there was a delicious current flowing through Pharma's energy field, one that assured the right amount of riveting cruelty. He swept his thumb back and forth across Ambulon's palm, pressing a little harder each time.
Unable to help himself, Ambulon lolled his head and moaned. No one could stimulate a medic’s hands like another doctor, and Pharma was a master tease when it came to manipulating digits. Or an expert torturer, depending on his mood.
A heavy ache settled into Ambulon’s palm. The metal of his frame was hot to the touch, stifling him. Requests from his interface array climbed his status queue. "Pharma…"
"Yes?" Pharma's face contorted into a mask of innocence, or his haughty approximation of innocence. He flicked his wings once and popped one of Ambulon's fingers in his mouth. His smooth tongue curled around it and sucked. Hard.
Ambulon gasped. A shock of something tight and urgent seized him, leaving him trembling with every swipe of Pharma’s tongue. Making him weak, needy. Freeing him with a disgraceful comfort. He wouldn’t have to think about anything.
Pharma would take control.
Ambulon vaulted into Pharma’s lap, one hand clenching desperately at a brightly colored shoulder vent, the other burning in the jet’s mouth. Warm heat pooled behind his panel, threatening to leak out the seams onto the perfect bot beneath him. “Pharma…don’t stop.” Please, please, touch me MORE. He buried his head into Pharma’s neck and struggled not to whimper.
It was, as always, a losing battle. Without warning, the fatal crack in his self-control widened. Oh, fragging Primus, not this again. A Decepticon emblem appeared before his vision, and the last lines of Ambulon’s gestalt coding activated. The few simple commands that were buried so deeply within his base programming, the Autobot scientists who examined him after his defection didn't dare remove them.
The vestigial code shouldn't have been a problem. They told him it would most likely remain dormant for the rest of his function. But ever since Ambulon had started fragging his boss, he had discovered that the code activated whenever he was stimulated intensely. It made him fragile for some sort of connection, ensuring that he would lose every one of his encounters with Pharma, every time. And come crawling back for more.
Ambulon swore that Pharma knew too, that the snobby jet could sense it. The thought was both terrifying and a total turn-on.
A long list of unwanted information scrolled across his HUD, and the tender, empty part of him screamed for more. For the raging overload that would fool those last lines of code into thinking that he had combined.
It brought him to a point where manual directives weren't given priority. There was a loud click, and his panel retracted. His spike pressurized instantly, popping up between them like a filthy exclamation point.
"Heh…" Ambulon cast a shy glance at Pharma, noting the victorious glow that stole across his face. Oh yeah. Pharma definitely knew.
Pharma eased the finger out of his mouth. "For someone who wanted to sneak away, you were awfully loud about it." He leveraged his superior weight, shoving Ambulon onto his back. "How did you manage to escape from anywhere?" Nimble fingers encircled a skinny wrist. Pharma’s hold was like iron.
Plating threatened to buckle. Ambulon squirmed. It hurt, both the pressure around his wrist and the comment.
"Do you know what I think? I think you wanted me to wake up."
Ambulon scoffed. Or he tried to. The resulting sound was far too whiny to convey any real disbelief.
"I think you wanted me to wake up.” Pharma grinned. “I know you like it when I watch.”
Guided by Pharma, Ambulon's hand closed over his own spike. He never would have imagined he’d be the type of bot who’d enjoy playing with himself for an audience. It should have been embarrassing, but to see that fierce look of hunger, to feel the jet's EM field flare with open interest, the shame morphed into something good and heady.
“Oh.” Ambulon worked himself in hand, thrilling to the pleasurable friction, touching himself with the hard, measured strokes he wished Pharma would use. He wriggled his legs around the outside of Pharma's hips and hooked them closer together. "Is this what you wanted?” he asked, breathless for approval.
"Almost." Pharma retracted his own panel, revealing his rapidly pressurizing spike. It was large and flashy, like the rest of him. With bold medic colors and white bio lights down the underside. He made a show of teasing himself, free hand still clamped around Ambulon's wrist joint.
There was something so intimate about these mutual jerk-off sessions, about the way Pharma loomed above him like an icy statue. The soft scrapes of shuffling metal and huffing vents. How the jet maintained eye contact the entire time, cooing condescending encouragements while they worked themselves to completion. At first Ambulon thought it was all about Pharma getting off without the messiness of actual interfacing. By now he’d come to believe that his boss had a bit of a voyeur streak. One he was learning to appreciate as well.
"That's it." Pharma all but sneered at him. "You like that, don't you, Ambulon?"
A murmured affirmation left Ambulon’s mouth. His charge rose higher, driven by the blissful feedback loop between his sensitive hand and his spike. He gripped himself hard. Packets of information pulsed through his neural net. Heat. Pleasure. The growing, shaky need behind his interface array.
All under the weight of Pharma’s penetrating gaze. It was disturbing how willingly Ambulon threw away every part of himself to be pinned by that look. Well, almost every part of himself. He was keeping his fragging chest plate closed, no matter how badly his life force surged in its chamber.
Fortunately Pharma never uncovered his own spark, although he certainly seemed to enjoy openly masturbating over Ambulon’s prone body. The jet bit his lower lip, optics burning with the same mad concentration he displayed when performing a nano piston calibration. He thrust into his own hand, motor revving loudly.
Their fingers brushed together whenever one of them moved a hand. Every time Pharma pumped his spike, he sent a lusty charge through Ambulon's already tingling fingers. He grabbed at Pharma's leg with his free hand and groaned.
"Oooo…I know that sound,” said Pharma. "You're close, aren't you?"
Ambulon nodded and shuttered his optics. He was close. He saw warnings of an imminent overload; felt the first lick of bliss around the edges of his lust-addled mind.
Pharma let go of Ambulon's wrist. "Ask me nicely."
Too far gone, Ambulon's pleas came out in a static-laced jumble. "Please…oh, Primus…Pharma…"
"Good comparison." Pharma wrapped his hand around Ambulon's, fondling the digits in short strokes.
And that was it. The stimulation to his over-sensitive fingers tipped Ambulon over the edge. His back arched off the berth, struts seizing as the first wave of delicious release sizzled across his circuits. He screamed when he came, howling some ridiculous affirmation to Primus and Pharma and oh yes yes. Transfluid splattered across his body as he convulsed with delight over and over and over again.
Half of his systems were offline when the great swell of bliss finally ebbed. He struggled to boot up his optics, not wanting to miss a second of Pharma's reaction.
It was worth it. Pharma's full attention was fixated on him, mouth hanging open as he fervently jerked off over Ambulon's smoldering frame. He looked close himself. Little arcs of electricity popped all over his straining body, and his turbine only whined like that when he was on the verge of an overload.
Ambulon reached over with his clean hand, intending on returning the favor by rubbing the jet's fingers.
"No. Mmphf,” grunted Pharma. “Touch my wing."
Wing. Right. Pharma was a medic and a flier, which meant he had all sorts of enticing erogenous zones for someone so aloof. Ambulon sat up. He grabbed the edge of a wing and pinched it hard, sliding his fingers down the length of it.
Pharma moaned, cursed, and overloaded on the spot. He threw his head back. “Ah…yes…”
It was the best thing ever, to watch uptight Pharma shudder in the throes of pleasure. "Frag, yes," Ambulon whispered, keeping up his punishing massage on Pharma's wing.
Eventually Pharma stopped shaking and leaned forward. The rectangular protrusion on his helm fit perfectly into the groove on top of Ambulon's. Like they were made for each other. A nauseating thought.
Ambulon sighed. It was almost sweet, sitting together like this. Still holding onto each other as programs rebooted and frames cooled. Pharma's energy field, usually held so tight and unreadable, was now relaxed and open. It swirled around Ambulon, buzzing with satisfaction. Almost sweet. Kind of.
The moment didn't last long, it never did. Pharma raised his head and said, "Make sure you and First Aid inventory the new shipment of MARBs that arrived yesterday."
"It'll get done," said Ambulon. As if he wasn't already planning on doing that. They were desperate for more Mobile Autobot Repair Bays after the last one broke down. Pharma had talked about the shipment so many times in the last few weeks, there was no way anyone was forgetting about it.
"And we're tapping a fresh tank of energon for the facility today. Dogfight should be hooking it up now."
"I'm aware."
"Good." Pharma patted Ambulon on the leg and stared absently into space. Already slipping into his ‘distant doctor’ veneer. "Good. I'm gonna go get washed up. I'll see you when your shift starts." He got up and took a rag from his desk, wiping himself off before he tossed it at Ambulon. "Clean yourself up, and clean the paint chips off my berth. I want this place immaculate when I return tonight."
Ambulon caught the rag, trying to hide any reaction to the sting of Pharma's comment. How was it, after everything he’d been through, that words could still hurt? Shouldn’t one become inured to pain over time?
Pharma was half out the door when he stopped. "Oh, and Ambulon?" The wicked, not-quite smile was back. "Don't be late." With that, he flounced out the door, wings held high.
Ambulon flopped back on the berth. Emotional anguish, lust, and humiliation. All before morning energon. Just another day at Delphi.
Hopefully today’s shift would be a manageable one.
For the first time since his transfer to Messatine, Ambulon stepped onto the ward late for his shift.
He snuck towards a diagnostic station. So far, no Pharma. So no disapproving glare. The day was looking up already.
Cleaning the berth had taken forever, leaving Ambulon little time to get ready. He'd foregone the wash racks, opting instead for what his Autobot comrades called a "Decepticon Bath". This involved washing yourself off quickly with a wet towel in lieu of taking a real solvent shower.
He hadn't even had time to properly refuel, as the churning in his tank kept reminding him.
But stepping onto the ward felt good. For Ambulon, beginning a shift was like charging into battle. A fight where saving lives, rather than taking them, was the primary goal. His weapons were propex swabs and energon boosters. His armor was training and knowledge. And his past? His past was long gone when he stepped onto the ward, or at least far enough away to feel like a corrupted memory file. One that couldn't hurt him. Not anymore.
When Ambulon had defected to the Autobots, there had been nothing left. No friends, no future, and, thanks to the wonders of Decepticon technology, no chance of ever repainting himself to blend in with his new faction. He realized early on that if he were to survive he'd need a mission, something to wrap around himself like a force field when things seemed hopeless.
So he'd adopted a three-pronged objective: save lives, help other defectors, and get some fragging payback. The three ideas fed into and supported each other, allowing him to move forward. It took some of the bite out of the mistrust and mockery. As long as he was in it for those ideas, he was making progress. Frag the Autobots who hated him and to hell with the DJD.
That didn't mean that life was perfect. Far from it. Pharma was a huge source of frustration. His nurse, First Aid, was another.
Ambulon walked to the back of the ward, and spied First Aid huddled in a corner over a vidscreen. He'd like to think that the nurse was looking over patient charts, but it was probably another one of Fisitron's Wrecker entries.
"First Aid," he said.
First Aid jumped and quickly started tapping on keys. "A-Ambulon! Hey. I was getting worried about you. You're late."
Play it cool, Ambulon told himself. There was no way First Aid knew the reason for his tardiness. Right? "My chronometer had a minor glitch during recharge."
"Well, it's your lucky day. Pharma’s in a rare good mood. He only criticized my work for ten minutes this morning."
"Wow," said Ambulon. "Only ten? That is a good mood." He didn't mention, of course, that Pharma's good mood no doubt had to do with getting off and having someone else clean up the mess.
First Aid patted him on the arm. "Don't worry though. I won't tell him you were late."
"Appreciate it." Ambulon attempted a small smile. The expression died halfway through and probably looked more like a grimace than anything else. After years of working together, he still didn't know how to deal with First Aid's kindness. Pharma's epic jerkitude was easy; First Aid's offers of genuine friendship were not.
"Have you refueled? I didn't see you come to the cafeteria for morning rations, so I grabbed you a cube." First Aid picked up an energon cube from a nearby desk and handed it to him.
"Thanks," said Ambulon. He punctured the top, took a long sip, and frowned. The energon had a strange, tangy flavor to it. "This tastes funny."
"Yeah, I know. Dogfight hooked up a new tank for us this morning before he went back to the mines. Maybe it's a little impure. Should be fine though."
Ambulon took another drink. He'd tasted worse. "So what’ve we got today?"
First Aid handed him some charts. “Slow day. Not much to do unless there’s an emergency.”
Ambulon scanned the datapads. Mainly circuit board adjustments and actuator recalibrations. Nothing major. If this turned into a quiet day, they could always do one of Pharma’s neurotic cleaning chores. “Let’s get to it, then.”
They split up the tasks, with Ambulon resetting actuators and First Aid attaching energon leads. All of the patients were offline, so the work went quickly and quietly. Only their occasional instructions to each other punctuated the easy silence.
The morning flew by in a blur of minor procedures. After a while, Ambulon left his station to check on First Aid again. They could prepare med slabs in the afternoon. Maybe the elusive Pharma would make an appearance.
A beeping patient alarm derailed his thoughts. It was Backstreet, one of the many miners currently at Delphi for repairs.
Ambulon checked the patient's vitals. "What the hell?" He read the scanner again. Backstreet displayed unusually high processor readings and a wildly fluctuating fuel pump rate, numbers more likely seen on a Syk junkie than on an unconscious patient.
"First Aid, what were Backstreet’s levels when you checked him this morning?" There was no answer. "First Aid?" Ambulon frowned and walked to the other end of the ward. If he caught the little fragger reading instead of working, there was gonna be hell to pay.
Instead he found First Aid sitting on a chair near a patient, his helm in his hands. "First Aid, this isn't time for a break."
First Aid raised his head. "Sorry. I….I'm not feeling so good all of a sudden."
He didn't look so good either. His hands were trembling, internal components working so hard that Ambulon heard them from where he stood. He ran the scanner over First Aid's body. "What's wrong?"
"I dunno…I just…"
Ambulon looked at the instrument. "Huh. That's strange."
"What? What's strange?" First Aid jumped up and pawed at him. "Is it cybercrosis? It's cybercrosis, isn't it? Tell me!"
"Whoa. Whoa. Easy. It's not cybercrosis. Primus, get a grip. You've got abnormal readings in your perceptual mainframe and some of your minor processes are fluctuating. Same thing as Backstreet over there."
"Oh." First Aid nodded his head. He kept nodding it as he spoke. "That is weird. I got the same thing from Schema."
"What!?" Ambulon scanned Schema. The actual numbers were different, but the symptoms were the same. Certain systems going haywire. Nothing life threatening, although definitely unusual. He scanned another patient. Then another. Everyone was showing signs of minor malfunctions to varying degrees. "That's it, I'm getting Pharma."
"Oh no." First Aid’s visor flashed. "Oh no no no. Pharma said not to interrupt him until late in the cycle. He was really, really firm about it." His voice dropped low. "Ambulon, he'll be mad."
This was getting too weird. First Aid never cared about getting on Pharma’s bad side. "So let him be mad." Ambulon maneuvered the nurse back to the chair. "You sit here and monitor your functions. I'm gonna go get Pharma and we'll run deep scans on everyone. It'll be fine, First Aid. Try to stay calm."
"Okay." First Aid’s vocalizer broke, like he was about to cry.
Ambulon rushed out the door and down the hall towards Pharma's office. What the frag was going on? It could be a virus of some sort, but that didn't explain how First Aid contracted it. The doctors never shared equipment or hardline connections with patients. His mind spun with theories, discarding them as quickly as he formulated them. There was an uncomfortable churning in his fuel tanks.
He didn’t bother to ring the intercom outside of Pharma’s door and ask for entrance. Frag niceties, something was wrong. Instead Ambulon barged in and said, "Pharma, we need you on the waa….."
Ambulon never finished his sentence, letting the final word dangle into oblivion. He stifled a gasp, hand flying to his mouth. A dizzying coldness seized his core. Oh no, no, NO…
There, standing in Pharma's office as though he were discussing a routine checkup, stood the leader of the Decepticon Justice Division.