Chapter Text
It was raining.
The smell rushed through the door when Wheeljack entered. Sulfuric acid, overlain with moisture and metal and stifling heat. The storm had brought no relief from the miserably muggy summer weather, just more discomfort. Kaon, in summer, was an unpleasant place.
"Ratch!" Wheeljack shouted, from outside the door.
Ratchet made a face even as he was rising from his seat behind the counter. His receptionist had called in, trapped in his home by the acid rain. This wasn't much of an inconvenience, as most of his patients had cancelled their appointments, too. Wheeljack opened the door, but before he could say anything Ratchet snapped, "Get in and shut the door, it stinks out there."
Wheeljack, it seemed, wasn't bright enough to stay out of the rain. He had some sort of a force field shimmering around him, likely repelling some of the acid, but Ratchet could see the engineer's paint nanytes were bleached to the ankles from wading through overflowing gutters. That force field clearly didn't extend all the way to the ground.
Wheeljack ignored Ratchet's admonition and informed him sharply, "There's a mech in the gutter out front!"
"... Slag." Ratchet headed for the door, heedless of the scalding rain.
He thought, at first, it was a corpse. The water was ankle deep and it swirled around the body, gurgling through gaps in the armor and hissing faintly as it reacted to the the energon seeping from raw wounds. However, the mech was still bleeding energon and damaged circuits were sparking weakly.
It wasn't the first time a mortally wounded mech had been dumped in front of the clinic's door. Ratchet, mouth set in a harsh and angry line, grabbed the mech by the shoulders. Wheeljack took the feet, and together, they hoisted him up and carried him through the door.
He didn't have a face.
Or hands.
The wounds were untreated, fresh, and done with surgical precision. Ratchet swore, surveying the damage. The mech's entire face was gone -- optics, nasal arch, upper and lower jaw, all the way back to the cranial vault. It was a huge, gaping, hopeless wound -- the protoform had been deliberately burnt and even the attachment points for tension wires and hydraulics removed. Not only was everything gone, but it'd be a pit of a job to rebuild it.
His arms had been amputated at the wrist.
It got worse. They'd used high voltage electricity to burn out neural wires all the way back to the processor ... and then cause selective damage to the processor itself. Not only had they removed his jaw, they'd destroyed the part of his processor that mapped his jaw. Likewise, they'd fried the wires and processor circuits for his hands.
And they'd destroyed the circuits for one optic. The other, they'd just amputated. Raw wires danged from a weeping hole in his cranial substructure.
"Empurata." Wheeljack sighed, stating the obvious.
"Could have slagging well finished the job." Ratchet, arms folded across his chest, stared at the third bag of medical grade energon filling the mech's veins. It was expensive, but the mech was a large fellow, and he'd lost a lot. Ratchet had no choice but to dump several bags of energon into his veins if he wanted the mech to live.
"Don't think this is a legal punishment," Wheeljack said, "or they'd have actually, err, completed it."
"What, you haven't heard about the Department of Justice's budget cuts?" Ratchet said, with black humor. Then he shook his head, and agreed with Wheeljack, "No, not a legal punishment, or they'd have branded his protoform, too." Ratchet decided that the mech was stable enough now, and stalked to his terminal. Ordering the parts to engineer a repair was going to strain -- wipe out, if he was honest -- the little non-profit clinic's resources. They weren't expensive, particularly with Jacky's free labor thrown in, but the clinic was just that poor.
"Err, should I call the enforcers?"
"Let's talk to the kid first." Kid. Ratchet had discovered, among other things, that his patient was not actually a youngling, but he was barely legally an adult. He was convoy class, but he had few signs of hard labor -- his frame, under the damage caused by both the acidic water and the empurata itself, was good quality. His red paint, with blue highlights, had once been bright, and he'd had quite a few extra dataports (also burned away) but no weapons mods. Definitely a civilian.
The mech jerked awake with a staticky cry from his vocalizer.
"Easy." Ratchet rested a hand on his shoulder. "Easy, big guy."
Wheeljack, across the room, watched with concern. Despite zero signs of any kind of combat mods, the young mech was big enough to be dangerous. And Ratchet had refused to strap him down, citing 'he's had enough trauma.'
He didn't, as Wheeljack had feared, come up fighting. He did cry out again, however, and try to shove Ratchet away. Ratchet, whose reflexes were very well developed, simply blocked the clumsy swipe of a claw with one of his heavy-duty pauldrons without letting go of the mech.
"My name is Ratchet," the physician said, his name laced with all the glyphs that identified his profession and his surprisingly high class degree from Iacon's Medical University.
"I'm ... I'm in the hospital?" The mech said, turning his face -- with its new large, single, blue optic -- in Ratchet's direction.
"No." Ratchet sighed. "You're in my clinic in Kaon. Nearest actual hospital is half a day's travel away."
"But we're pretty good at fixing people." Wheeljack put in.
"That's my friend Jacky -- Wheeljack -- he's a frame engineer. Designs and installs mods. He did your rebuild, at least, what we could do for you."
Silence, from the mech. Then he raised both hands and stared down at them. All Ratchet had been able to give him was two pincers, and the hydraulics would be activated by neural lines in his upper arms that had once controlled his wrist flexion. He'd need to learn to use them. "It wasn't a nightmare."
"Afraid not. Got a name, kid?"
"Orion." The mech's field was suddenly terrified, but also angry. "Why did they do this to me?"
He reached, reflexively, for his face, and banged a stiff claw into his single optic. Ratchet winced, grabbed the claw to prevent further damage, and said, "It's as bad as you think. Don't break your optic, we just installed it."
"Empurata. But ... but ... I had permission." The young mech's anger was stronger. "I followed the rules! Alpha Trion -- Alpha Trion fought for me, and won! I don't understand. There should have been a trial, a hearing -- they just grabbed me. They grabbed me from my apartment and did this!"
"I don't think it was an officially sanctioned punishment. Who'd you piss off?"
"Nobody."
"You know Alpha Trion?" Wheeljack asked, pushing off the wall and padding closer.
"He's ... he's my ... I'm his apprentice."
The engineer and the medic exchanged a look. Perhaps this young mech had done nothing wrong, but Alpha Trion had been waging a long war against certain higher classes. This could be retribution for some of his recent court battles. The master archivist was untouchable by any measure, but his apprentice might just have been another matter.
"Your comms should be working," Ratchet said, gently, even as he guided Orion to sit up. Orion tried, again, to touch his face, but this time Ratchet was ready and grabbed his arm before he could damage himself with a clumsy blow from his own claw.
"They mutilated me," the young mech said, field suddenly blazing. "Why? I've always played within the rules! I've never broken any laws!"
"I'm sorry."
"This isn't a legal punishment! And they said it wouldn't be fixable!"
"Not ... entirely ... true." Ratchet sighed. "But it would require surgical modification of your processor itself, and there's no guarantee your intellect and personality would emerge intact."
In a small voice, the kid asked, "I can still work. Can't I?"
"Findin' work as an empurata's gonna be hard, but we'll help you, if what you say is true," Wheeljack said. "People are gonna assume you're ... tainted ... convicted of a crime. They do this to mecha who can't remember their station in life, an' t' real nasty criminals. The former usually got bad enemies, the latter ... nobody wants t' hire. We will help ... do what we can."
"... I am an apprentice archivist. I'd be a journeyman in a few orns. Alpha Trion intends to keep me on once I get my journeyman's glyph!" There was defiance in the young mech's voice and field, as well as boiling anger. "It was not easy to get this far! And I did it all legally!"
"Oh." Ratchet scrubbed his face with his hands. "Errm. They fried your dataports, kid."
Silence. For a long moment. Then, "Can I get new ones?"
"You're missing the neurocircuits to support them. That'd take a mnemosurgeon to replace."
"I've ... I've got money. I've saved!" He said this a bit anxiously, then added, with a flash of real fear, "It's probably more than I've got."
"Also runs the risk of changing who you are, kid." Ratchet said.
"Maybe a loan ..."
Wheeljack knew how much that kind of work cost. It was more credits than most mechanisms made in a lifetime ... he highly doubted an apprentice archivist's small savings would even come close. Perhaps, he hoped, Alpha Trion might help the kid. He didn't have the heart to tell the young mech that he'd never qualify for a loan for even far smaller amounts; they'd given him enough harsh truths today. He could find out about the functionalists' stranglehold on the financial system, and their unfair policies, later.
The young mech sat on a gurney in a corner, arms wrapped around his legs and head resting on his knees. He hadn't said a word since he'd sent a message to his master, and his field radiated fierce misery.
Wheeljack pulled Ratchet aside, out of the kid's earshot, and said, softly, "Think he's telling the truth?"
"Jackie, you don't have the skills." Ratchet frowned at his friend. "Or the mods. It'll take a mnemnosurgeon of the highest caliber, and I can't think of one I'd trust enough to refer him to. Assuming he has the credits."
"I'm just ..." Wheeljack's shoulders slumped. "It's not fair."
Grimly, Ratchet said, "You know how he keeps emphasizing law? And legal? Most mecha who talk like that are the ones who are breaking laws left and right, that, or they're the kind who find ways around the law -- they stay within the letter of the law while flouting the moral intent." It was a verbal tell he'd learned from a friend, a detective with the enforcers in Iacon.
"Or they're used to being accused of breaking the laws, and they have no intention of doing so," Wheeljack shot back.
Ratchet shook his head. "I'm sympathetic -- this is the cruelest kind of torture -- but I expect he may have crossed the wrong mecha, because he was thinking they couldn't touch him if he didn't break any laws. And he found out the hard way that the law is only a tool for the powerful. They've got other tools too."
"Or they were trying to punish his master."
"He's probably one of hundreds of apprentices under Alpha Trion ... I'm sure the Master Archivist has plenty just like him."
"And even if he did piss off the wrong mecha, that doesn't mean he's a bad mech."
Ratchet was about to question the kind of character that would bring a mere apprentice archivist to the attention of the high and mighty when the door chimed. He turned, and hurried for the front of the clinic, concerned that it might be an emergency that had just walked through his door. It was still raining four days after the start of the storm, and his receptionist hadn't shown up yet. Nobody was moving except by underground tunnels, and half of those were flooded. His only patients had been emergencies, so he certainly wasn't expecting the mech who stood, peering about curiously, in the center of his empty waiting room.
The Master Archivist was tall, his helm fins nearly touching the ceiling. He would need to duck to go through the doorways. Ratchet, absently, remembered he was a shuttle, though he'd never heard of Alpha Trion traveling offworld in recent times. A suborbital flight did explain how the shuttle had gotten here so fast, but not why.
He was white. With gold filigree. He dripped acid rain on Ratchet's clinic floor, his engines steamed, and optics of the purest blue studied the medic with startling intensity. "... I see he's in the right place," the archivist said, deep voice surprisingly soft and musing.
"Sir!" Ratchet stammered, and dropped to one knee. Behind him, Wheeljack dropped too, with a gasped greeting. Both bowed their heads. This was a former Prime, the oldest living mech among a very long lived race and -- Legend had it -- he'd been forged by Primus himself. While neither of them were particularly reverent under normal circumstances, Ratchet was inclined to be respectful to Primes and Wheeljack had at least a few self-preservation instincts.
"Rise." That voice was sonorous, warm and rich with glyphs that claimed wisdom, age and power and -- surprising to Ratchet -- humility.
He scrambled to his feet.
"My young apprentice has told me what has happened. This is unprecedented." Alpha Trion seemed genuinely mournful.
"Yes." Ratchet blinked, then answered in a rush, "Yes, he's here -- Orion, right?"
He was babbling. He was babbling at Alpha Trion. Ratchet, who prided himself on his personal dignity, shut his mouth with a click, and tried for calm. At best, he'd expected the Master Archivist to send a servant to collect the kid, if he didn't abandon him entirely. Ratchet had never expected he'd find Alpha Trion himself, on a raining summer afternoon, in his waiting room. If he'd known, perhaps he could have spent a few more credits on a few more repairs for the kid ... and mopped the rust from the corners, maybe put a fresh coat of paint on the walls and replaced a few of the burnt out light bulbs.
However, he reminded himself firmly, there was little they could have done for Orion short of hiring a mnemnosurgeon. Wheeljack had fabricated the mech's claws, optic, and fuel intake from decent quality components (some of them second hand, but sterilized and refurbished before installation) and Ratchet knew his surgical skills were excellent. Ratchet had installed them, as well as fashioning a mask to hide the mech's gruesome lack of a face. And they'd done it all before he'd known that the mech had any political connections. Or a bank account.
"I am certain your work was of the highest caliber," Alpha Trion said, as if he'd read Ratchet's mind. "I am relieved he found you, rather than another."
Ratchet blinked at that. Relieved that he found him? Why? He didn't know Alpha Trion. Ratchet knew his record was good, but overall it was unremarkable. He wasn't the only skilled physician in the world, or even the only one with a charity clinic in the slums of Kaon.
He boggled, again, that Alpha Trion was here in the slums of Kaon, on a rainy afternoon, with grey streaks from the acid on his wings. Alpha Trion was dripping on his floor.
"May I see him?"
"Oh -- of course!" Ratchet considered the water still trickling from Alpha Trion's frame. He liked to keep his clinic clean, and, he realized, he was being rude. "Errm. Would you like a towel?"
Wheeljack put in, "We have a wash rack you can use ..."
Alpha Trion, despite the fact that the acidic water probably itched and most mechanisms would have eagerly jumped at the chance to shower off, simply accepted the towel that Ratchet pulled out of a supply closet. "I have survived worse than rain. I would like to see my student."
Ratchet, after due consideration of the mech's large size, handed him a second towel, and then led him into the clinic proper. Anyone else, he would have made shower first, but he could always mop the sulfur dioxide laced water up after Alpha Trion left. The tiles of the clinic floor were made to be durable, and would not be damaged, though he could do without the stink in his workspace. And it wasn't like Orion, who had been thoroughly soaked right down to the protoform, hadn't covered everything in sulfurous water earlier. The smell, unfortunately, lingered, and permeated everything.
Orion looked up, then perked up, when he saw his master. Though his single optic and mask had no expression -- the neural circuits necessary for translating emotions to facial expressions were literally burned away -- his body language changed from depressed to relieved. "Sir!"
"Orion." Alpha Trion, too, looked relieved. "When you disappeared, I feared the worst."
Orion rose, scrambling to his feet, though he was a bit unsteady. It appeared he planned to kneel as Ratchet and Wheeljack had, but Alpha Trion swept him into a tight embrace, fierce and close. He stated, "I feared you dead!"
Orion's field flared with surprise; he was every bit as shocked as Ratchet was. It appeared that he was no mere student to the ancient mech, though Orion clearly hadn't been expecting Alpha Trion's reaction.
Finally, the archivist released him, and stepped back. He rested his hands on Orion's pauldrons and regarded him gravely. "This ... this should not have happened. It was most unexpected and I am sorry I did not anticipate it."
"Why ... why me?" Orion gazed up at his master. "I don't understand. I've done nothing."
"Is someone trying t' get revenge?" Wheeljack demanded, "Angry at you, sir, and taking it out on the kid?"
"No." Alpha Trion frowned. "I have enemies, but they would have taken credit had they done this. None have. I expect the motivations were different, though why this and not death..." he frowned. "The result would be the same, but this was personal. An act of revenge, I believe, but not for any crimes you have yet committed, child."
"I don't understand." Orion's voice was very small.
Alpha Trion sighed, and turned his attention to Ratchet. "There is not a mnemnosurgeon alive that I would trust with Orion Pax's processor. Better that he remain as he is than suffer worse damage."
Ratchet was inclined to agree, having seen the disastrous complications of processor repairs before, but he offered tentatively, for Orion's benefit, "I can name a few colleagues who might be able to perform the work, if money was no object."
The Master Archivist was wealthy; if he cared about Orion, perhaps he would pay. Ratchet, and Alpha Trion, might think that the repairs were too dangerous, but they were not the ones who would have to live in Orion's mutilated body. Perhaps it would be best if they let Orion make that decision for himself.
However, Alpha Trion's wings flicked back in a contemptuous gesture; his wings were so large that this caused a gust of air through the room. "They could do the work, but I would not trust them. Should they learn ..." he trailed off. Ratchet wondered what it was that Alpha Trion wasn't saying; it was obvious that he was censoring his own comments. "No. Not now. In the future, perhaps someone will surface who could be trusted to do the work, and if that day comes, I will help with any finances needed. For now, there are worse fates, my young apprentice ..." he glanced at Ratchet, and said firmly. "He will need an occupation."
"Not many will hire him. Even if you yourself spoke for him. Sir. Though if he can use you as a reference, it will help, and I may be able to provide some leads?"
"You will hire him."
"I ..." Ratchet didn't particularly want to argue with a mech this powerful, but he summoned the nerve anyway, and said, "Sir. This clinic functions from funds raised through donations and fundraisers. Our funds are limited. I cannot even afford to pay Wheeljack; he donates his time. My salary is a pittance; enough to keep me fueled and painted and that's about it. Many of my patients work off the small cost of their repairs by cleaning and running errands for me, so I do not lack for unskilled labor. How am I to afford to hire your apprentice, especially since I do not need him?"
Ratchet had pissed off his share of senators, nobles, and enforcers with harsher words. Speaking the truth to a mechanism whose job was to be dispassionate, analytical, and accurate was -- hopefully -- not going to have severe repercussions. Besides, it needed to be said.
Orion added, "Alpha Trion, I would prefer to stay with you, sir. I understand ..." here, he paused, and his vocalizer hissed with static, and his field flared with fear and a terrible grief, "Sir, please! Please don't, don't ... I understand that I will not be able to perform the function that I trained for. However, perhaps I could be of assistance in other ways. I could ... I could find something useful to do. And I'd stay out of sight. Sir, please ..."
There was something terribly sad in the ancient mech's optics. "It doesn't suit you to beg, Orion."
Orion's back struts straightened. He said, in a firmer tone of voice, though his field was no less upset, "Sir, I would like to continue in your employment. I believe I can still be of use."
"Better." Alpha Trion smiled, very gently, at the single blue optic staring up at him. "Do not ever grovel, Orion, or think yourself less than others. You have ..." the archivist stopped. There was a good bit of distress in his own field now. "I do not know what your future holds. The pathways of time have diverged in a way unforseen. But you remain one of the brightest young mecha, one of the most decent, that I will ever meet."
With a chill, Ratchet remembered just how old Alpha Trion was. And he recalled some of the other legends about the mecha, including that he wasn't, entirely, of this world. For him to proclaim Orion one of the most decent, and most intelligent, mechanisms he'd ever met was something remarkable.
Alpha Trion turned his attention to Ratchet, again, though he spared a long look (with a sudden flare of recognition in his field) for Wheeljack. "I believe, Orion, you are in the place you need to be. Ratchet -- I will see that your clinic is funded. You will receive enough to pay Orion, to increase your own salary to a reasonable amount, to pay Wheeljack for his work, and to expand this clinic. I ask only that you find an use for Orion, and that you will look out for him."
Ratchet quirked an optic ridge up. "I'm not a nannybot."
"I will see that it is worth your while, and Orion has never been prone to creating trouble. If anything, he is already mature beyond his years."
Orion protested, "He doesn't want me here! And sir, you shouldn't be paying for my welfare ..."
Alpha Trion reached out, and cupped a hand around Orion's helm in a gentle touch. His thumb traced the seam between the dead metal of Orion's mask, and the living tissue of his natural armor. "Make yourself useful, Orion."
"No! Don't leave me!"
Then, heedless of the rain which still fell outside, Alpha Trion exited the recovery ward, ducked through the exit, and launched aloft with a roar of engines.
Orion had tried to follow him, but stopped in the waiting room. He sobbed one short, sharp, scared cry, which he bit off as if he was trying to hide the terror he felt. There was no concealing the fear in his field, however, nor the terrible sense of loss. He tried to cover his face with his hands, but succeeded only in whacking himself in the face with his claws.
Ratchet, torn between the impulse to run outside after the departing ancient shuttle and the impulse to throw something, stood helplessly in the middle of the room behind Orion.
Orion stared after the archivist, and did not move.