Chapter Text
When Jazz sent him a code pink emergency alert on the Priority One comms channel, Ratchet had his go bag in hand and his pede halfway out the door before he’d even responded. If Jazz, the most recalcitrantly truant mech he’d ever had the misfortune of treating, was calling something a life-threatening circulatory emergency, chances where that somebody was already dead.
“Location,” he snapped over the comm line, and Jazz pinged him coordinates without a moment’s hesitation.
“Bring whatever you need for a transfusion, Ratchet,” Jazz said, uncharacteristically grave. “Hound and I found a sparkling while out on patrol, and she’s lost a lot of energon.”
A sparkling? An injured sparkling, here on Earth of all places? How in the Pit had she even gotten out here?
“How much energon?” Ratchet asked. “Can you tell how she’s been injured?”
“Hard to tell, it’s kind of spread all over,” Jazz said. “Maybe… eight or nine liters?”
Ratchet’s spark stuttered.
“Eight or nine liters?” he said, aghast, even as he transformed and started tearing across the landscape toward the pinged coordinates. “Is she still conscious? Do you have pressure on the wound?”
“Chill, Ratchet.” Jazz is clearly making an effort to sound lighthearted and reassuring, but Ratchet can hear the straining undercurrent, nonetheless. “Yeah, she’s a sparkling but she’s not a little-little bit, probably comes up to my waist if I had to make a guess, and big in the chest area. And yeah, she’s conscious, keeps hissing and snarling like anything if Hound or I get too close to her.”
Something in Ratchet settled slightly at that. That was closer in stature to a mini-bot than the palm-sized newspark he’d been picturing when Jazz said sparkling, but that was still a lot of energon to lose at that age.
“What treatment have you given so far? Has the bleeding stopped?”
“None,” Jazz said.
“None?” Ratchet said. “What the slag are you doing, mech, just standing there?”
“Ratch, I literally called ya as soon as I saw the blood trail we were following ended at a sparkling,” Jazz said, voice rising with frustration. “Hound’s trying to get her out now so we can give her some proper first aid, but she’s already got some sharp little claws and she ain’t afraid to use ‘em.”
“Get her out?” If she was in a dangerous location—
“She wedged herself under a rock, and neither of us is small enough to get in after her without facing the little claws.” Jazz paused, and then said tensely, “She’s panicking real bad, Ratch, I can feel it in her field from like ten meters.”
On the one hand, panicking could make her fuel pump faster, speeding up the loss of energon; on the other hand, Ratchet still didn’t know anything about how serious the injury was. “Can you see where she’s bleeding from?” he asked.
“Nah, she’s curled up so it’s hidden, basically all I can see is her face and her side. Think it might be down in the pelvic region or her leg, but it’s hard to tell.”
There was the slight hiss and beep as another mech joined the priority one line. “She’s got a dent on the back of her helm, too,” said Hound. “Pretty deep, but it doesn’t seem to be bleeding too bad anymore, just seeping.”
“And she’s still conscious?” If she was conscious that meant the slowed bleeding was probably self-repair at work, rather than a potentially-fatal loss of energon pressure. Hound pinged an affirmative—still conscious.
“Keep trying to coax her out, if you can do that without scaring her too bad,” Ratchet said finally. “I’m on my way. Let me know if there’s any change whatsoever, understand?”
About two breem later he ran across a trail of smeared, muddy energon and scrapes in the dirt—probably the exact same trail that Hound and Jazz had found that led them to the poor sparkling. He gunned his engine, crested a hill, and was suddenly looking down at Jazz and Hound and a barely-visible crevice in the side of a ravine.
“Hey, Ratch,” Jazz said curtly. “She seems less panicked, but we haven’t gotten her out yet.”
Jazz’s EMF was clamped down as tightly as his voice, not even a whisper of emotion getting past his plating, and Ratchet couldn’t blame him at all. The sparkling’s field was enormous, filled with fear and pain, blooming larger as she desperately sought help she was too frightened to actually accept.
Trying his best to project gentle, soothing calm—not that he’d ever been good at manipulating his field—Ratchet knelt down beside Hound and peered into the little crevice.
Tiny red optics looked back at him in the gloom, somehow both terrified and defiant. Miniature fans whirred loudly, trying to cool off the mechling’s overheating processor. In the darkness, Ratchet couldn’t make out much more than the dark lumpy silhouette of her body.
“Hey there,” Ratchet said. “My name’s Ratchet, I’m a medic, and I’m here to—”
But he’d scarely finished saying the word “medic” before the little sparkling’s eyes widened and she uncurled slightly.
“M-medic?” came a scratchy, stuttering voice. Sounded like maybe she’d damaged her vocalizer.
“Yeah,” Ratchet said. “I’m here to help.”
A desperate sob, a surge of fear and helplessness in the little mech’s field, and then she was scrambling forward, reaching towards Ratchet and crying out in pain. He didn’t have to think. He grabbed her under her arms and pulled her out into the light so he could examine her, enveloping her in his own EMF as best he could.
As soon as he could take a good look at the mechling, three things registered to him in rapid succession.
One, the source of the bleeding was her left leg, which had been horrifically maimed. It looked like something had slammed into her pede at velocity, and the resulting force had pushed her shin armor up and into her thigh, telescoping into her own body all the way up to the hip joint, whereupon the whole limb had simply crumpled like aluminum foil. Her left leg was barely a third of the length of her uninjured right, and she was beyond lucky nothing had nicked her femoral line.
Two, she was definitely a sparkling, because her shoulders and her remaining leg had the raised ridges of tread buds and sprocket covers—wheels were typically some of the first kibble to grow in on a mechling, and hers weren’t even fully detached enough to spin yet. Given her size, she was probably either a tank or some kind of heavy machinery build, and likely less than a dozen vorn old.
Three, she had fierce little red optics, a top-heavy build, and a bucket-shaped helm so familiar that Ratchet instantly knew exactly who this sparkling belonged to.
Normally he would have thought abandoning an injured sparkling on an alien planet was a bridge too far even for Megatron, but the evidence suggested that was precisely what he’d done.
“Yikes,” said Jazz, distantly, and then, “Yikes.”
The mechling was now clinging to Ratchet’s plating and sobbing hard enough she might genuinely crack her optics open from internal pressure, probably because a leg injury that bad had to be absolutely fragging excrutiating.
Ratchet grabbed the mechling’s helm, tilted her face down, and jacked into the medical port on the back of her neck before he was even fully aware of what he was doing. “Shh, shh,” he murmured, uploading a pain-inhibitor patch for generalized anaesthetic and slipping through her near non-existent sparkling firewalls to cut the sensors in her left hip.
The sparkling flopped against him with a whimper of relief as her leg went numb, going limp and strutless against his chassis. She was still bleeding, and Ratchet could feel the energon trickling down his own plating.
“There, that’s better, isn’t it?” Ratchet said, laying the sparkling down so that he could put some meshes on her to stop the bleeding. On an adult ‘bot with damage this extensive he would have just shut off all energon flow to the limb in question, but on a sparkling such a procedure risked a coding self-amputation.
The sparkling let out a muffled noise of protest when Ratchet set her down, still reaching for him. Ratchet glanced up at Hound. “You hold her hand or something to calm her, I’m busy,” he said, and started running a diagnostic scan on her systems at the same time as he started working on the injured leg.
A growl, a flinch, a sudden pulse of fear in the mechling’s field, and Ratchet looked up. The sparkling was snarling at Hound’s raised hand, curling towards Ratchet. Her face showed angry bravado, but her field reeked of stark, helpless terror.
“Hey, it’s all right, kiddo,” Ratchet said, putting a comforting hand on her good hip. “That’s Hound. He’s not gonna hurt you.”
The mechling shrank closer to him, refusing to take her eyes off of Hound and certainly refusing to taking his hand. Ratchet looked up at Jazz, bewildered.
Jazz shrugged. “Looks like she’s decided you’re the only safe one here, my mech,” he said.
Her spark was starting to spin faster in fright—not good, seeing as he still hadn’t stopped the bleeding or initiated an energon transfusion yet. The initial diagnostic report was telling him her circulatory pressure was starting to get low enough to be concerning. Ratchet had to distract her somehow.
“Hey,” he said, and stroked a hand over her helm, deliberately blocking her view of Jazz and Hound. The motion also let him get an initial tactile diagnostic of the dent in her helm; fragging Pit that was deep.
The sparkling turned to look at him, her optics wide, and Ratchet smiled as comfortingly as he knew how. “Hey, kiddo,” he said, doing his best to start staunching the blood flow without looking away. “What’s your name?”
She blinked, and opened her mouth, but then paused, frowning. The frown deepened as she thought, and her spark started spinning harder and harder. Uneasy confusion bloomed into barely-contained panic in her field.
“Whoa, whoa, hey, it’s all right,” Ratchet said, once more reaching for her helm. Frag, how had something as simple as asking her name scared her this bad? “Hey, hey, what’s wrong?”
“Don’t… ‘member,” the sparkling mumbled haltingly, optics still wide and flaring.
“You don’t remember what’s wrong?” Ratchet said.
“Don’t ‘member… my name.”
Ratchet’s fingers automatically slid over to the potentially processor-damaging dent in the sparkling’s helm.
“Well, slag,” said Jazz.