Chapter Text
The war ended the day Megatron surrendered. The Cybertronian War, the Great War, whatever you called it. The war ended, and the slaughter began. The war ended, and their extinction began, the day Megatron called for a truce… and the horror of that, of his role in it, dried Ratchet’s intake and woke him gasping in the middle of the night.
Fifteen years ago, they’d sold the soul of their species to appease another. Fifteen years ago, Ratchet had watched Optimus do what the humans required, and realized he was a slave seeing the shackles on his wrists for the first time. We’re not Cybertronians, he’d thought, we’re their tools.
All their desperate tributes weren’t enough to save them. The humiliating days of sleeping in alt in the bright warehouse labeled Health and Human Services—and wasn’t that ironic now!—seemed very pleasant now. Now he recharged where he could, fueled where he could, and never enough.
Sometimes he didn’t know whether to blame Optimus or pity him. Oh, he’d tried to save them, he’d sacrificed himself to do it, frame and spark, over and over again, and his desperate cry to them to flee still echoed in Ratchet’s audials. He told himself that turning away from Optimus in that moment was the hardest thing he’d ever done, and on all but the very bad nights he could pretend it wasn’t a lie. On the very bad nights, he wondered if he could have changed any of it, if he had defected.
Now, he crouched in a corner of the old warehouse, optics dimmed to their lowest setting, and prayed that the headlights sweeping over his hiding place were stupid teenagers looking for a place to swim without their plating on. He knew he was wrong, but he had nowhere to go, and he’d prefer the last few moments of self-delusion to more unreasoning terror before he was captured and vivisected, thank you.
Self-delusion lost about the same time they blew the doors open. Ratchet curled himself up into a ball and cowered. Heroics be damned. After what he’d done for Optimus, he could hardly be heroic, and unlike Decepticons, being heroic wouldn’t get him killed any faster or less painfully.
He wanted to go home. He wanted to at least offline where the air smelled of clean metal, not with rank organic stink in his olfactory suite. He wanted to hear the wind over the Praxian Plains again, the Sonic Canyons sing. He wanted to hear another Cybertronian voice. He didn’t want to offline slowly, by inches, at alien hands; if Megatron had turned up at that instant, Ratchet would have thrown himself onto his claws gladly. Now, the horror of the imminent future swept up around him and he sobbed static into his hands, curling away from the lights.
He’d lost everything. His faith in Optimus, Optimus himself, Bumblebee and the others, and he had no reason to resist—but now, at the end of all things, he was too tired for theatrics. He was sparkbroken, and he was terrified. He had no dignity to protect; the humans had taken that, as they’d taken everything else.
There were snapped orders. Things he didn’t want to understand, wished he couldn’t understand. He clamped his hands over his audials and waited.
The back of the warehouse blasted open. Guns went off—and something walked in among them as if there was nothing in its way. His scanners noticed first. Cybertronian. He looked up in wild hope, and a smooth glass visor tilted down to look at him, green optics glowing behind it.
He knew that mech.
He was dead.
But it was better than the humans. He forced himself upright, and a massive hand caught him around the shoulders. Another seized him under the chin, forcing him to look at those optics.
“You are Optimus Prime’s medic,” he said. Cybertronian. Ratchet could have wept with relief.
“Get on with it and kill me,” he said, in the same language.
“No,” said Lockdown, and he was on the ground, knee in the back, hands wrenched behind him. The circuit-invading points of stasis cuffs stabbed past his wrist plating and into the sensitive lines beneath, energon trickling hot around them. A moment later, his ankles were given similar treatment.
Lockdown lifted him, paused looking down at the shocked humans. “He is mine,” he said. “Optimus Prime is mine. Do what you will, but do not interfere with my bounty, or you die.”
He walked away, heedless of the bullets. Ratchet watched the ground go by and tried to calm his panting.
He was probably going to die, but at least it wouldn’t be in human hands.
The humans did little to stop Lockdown from taking off, but that meant his attention turned to Ratchet all the faster. He had barely hung in his cell long enough to get his bearings—and be faintly disgusted and impressed by the range of ugly implements that lined its walls—before Lockdown returned.
“Tell me about Optimus Prime,” he said, circling Ratchet. Ratchet just looked at him, then dropped his helm.
“He’s your next bounty, is he?” he managed after some time.
“Tell me about Optimus Prime,” said Lockdown again.
“He’s dead,” said Ratchet flatly. “Has been for ten years.”
“No,” said Lockdown. Ratchet looked up at him again.
“Tell me about Optimus Prime.”
Ratchet offlined his optics.
He wondered then. He wondered if Optimus were still online, what did he owe Optimus? Optimus had asked such things of him. This was one more. Could he still give it? After all he had done, his loyalty was a sadly tattered rag indeed. He couldn’t claim to have honor, not since Africa. Optimus had done terrible things. Perhaps giving him to Lockdown would be justice.
Habit won. Ratchet looked up at Lockdown and managed to spit. “Go frag yourself.”
Lockdown nodded, considering. “We have time,” he said. “And the materials to hack you.”
“Go frag yourself,” said Ratchet more quietly, lowered his helm again, and offlined his optics.
Nothing to do but wait. At least the ship smelled of other Cybertronians. At least he wasn’t alone among aliens.