Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

First Aid comes online still partially submerged in his cryostasis tube, the freezing fluid drained down to his knees. Beyond the transparent shell of his chamber, the interior of his shuttle is little more than a fractal blur. His processor sluggishly registers the flickering lights above.

He peels the protective face mask off and hits the emergency release handle, wiping at his fogging visor as the upper panel opens, his hands numb and clumsy.

His audials online a few seconds later. The klaxon blaring overhead cuts through the clouded, muddy feeling in his processor; his first thought is that it might be a boarding party and the prospect of fending off raiders induces a frantic, scrambling climb over the lower metal lip. Recharge cables spark and spit as he strains the connection, so he rips them out and nearly sprawls face first onto the deck, collapsing onto one knee before he catches himself.

First Aid pulls himself upright and feels his way forward mostly by memory, his extended hands trembling, actuators stiff, plating slicked down. His frame is uselessly trying to conserve heat he doesn't have after two months submerged in refrigerant; he has to force his seams open to admit warmer air, still too cold to engage his internal heater to assist.

Error messages crowd his visor's HUD too fast to dismiss, so he tears it off with shaking hands and drops it on the deck.

The blurred interior of his shuttle is a dim maze of electronics, but a familiar one.

He wipes the fog from his optics and a thousand twinkling lights resolve into gently glowing displays, some flashing critical orange and red alerts. The main flight controls are still halfway across the cockpit.

The distance seems insurmountable in his current state, but he only needs access to the monitoring systems. He reaches out to the nearest interface and plugs into the comms panel, fingers slipping on the cord twice before he makes a connection.

First Aid silences the audible alarm with a jab of a fingertip while he accesses the ship's logs. There's no crew other than him to scramble; all the mechs that made the outbound journey with him stayed on the colony. He enters his passkey and flicks to the latest warning message, locating the source of the alarm — a Cybertronian distress beacon.

Some of the tension dissolves, melting away. No boarding party. He pauses for three full ventilation cycles before bringing up the communications controls. He pings the attached emergency frequency with his credentials, but receives no answer. A repeat attempt yields the same result.

Nothing. Not even the spitting crackle of an errored-out transmission. Dead air.

He yanks his cable from the comms station and climbs past it into the captain's seat, cursing, then jams it into the navigation interface. The computer chimes, incongruously cheerful, informing him he's still en route between the colony and Cybertron. It's an unremarkable sector of space with nothing to recommend itself but a few uninhabitable rocks that barely qualify as planetoids.

First Aid calls up the location from the distress beacon's metadata and enters the vector, fingers flying over the controls. His shuttle is off its programmed course by a three hundred thousand kliks, a microscopic distance in the vastness of space. That alone isn't unusual; the autopilot's logs indicate it rerouted around a potential debris hazard.

The signal's origin point isn't far from his current location, but it's so weak it's at the functional edge of his shuttle's sensor suite. If he hadn't been pushed off course, he might have never caught the distress signal.

He freezes over the console when he notes the attached timestamp.

The nav computer spits out a cheerful time estimate: only twenty minutes at full speed until he's within full scanning range, then eleven more until rendezvous.

To a ship that apparently went missing only a few weeks before the war.

The rest of his emergency protocols fizzle almost immediately and his frame idles down. A little misery creeps through in its wake. It's not as if they haven't found a dozen derelicts since the war ended, ships abandoned or lost in combat. This one is likely no different, an empty husk. It's worth investigating if someone hasn't disabled the distress beacon, if only to confirm it's in decent enough shape to flag it for salvage.

First Aid's fuel pump roils abruptly, a gurgle of air in his fuel lines. Refueling jumps to the highest priority the instant his processor registers there's no imminent threat to his safety and no immediate emergency to attend to.

He detaches his cable and suppresses a queasy request to purge as he rises from the pilot's chair and staggers towards the medical station. He struggles forward, a shuffle-clank clamor of sluggish limbs.

First Aid trips, but his haptics aren't fully active yet, so he only feels it as a dull impact when he catches himself on the edge of the waste disposal basin. The solvent kicks on automatically, steaming in the chilly air as he hoists himself upright and empties the contents of his fuel tank into the swirling liquid.

There's no energon to expel, just the sludgy, disgusting antifreeze congealing in his lines since he went under. The taste is sweet and foul, coating the inside of his mouth, but he feels better almost immediately, some of the dull throbbing in his fuel lines receding. His readings are all over the place, power generation shaky. Normal after a quick thaw, if slagging unpleasant.

First Aid wipes his chin with the back of his hand and it comes away unpleasantly wet. Worse, his historical monitoring suggests he's been having bad fluxes again — Delphi, probably, though he can only call up a deep feeling of unease from his recharge data. Cryo suspension was supposed to be a reprieve from the fluxes. So much for that.

He dismisses the memory files with an irritated mental swipe, shoving the murky, unpleasant data down into the recesses of his processor.

He doesn't need to remember the specifics. They're are always the same: patients dissolving into rust in his hands; Pharma dying in front of him — murdered, murderer; and worst of all, Ambulon's frame beneath his hands, crumbling faster than he can weld it back together while Ambulon begs First Aid to save him.

First Aid grimly spits out the rest of the antifreeze and flushes his mouth out with solvent. Twenty minutes is just about the right amount of time for him to refuel, perform a self assessment, and take a turn under the heated dry cycle in the shuttle's tiny wet room. He stands in front of the basin for a moment scrubbing his hands over his face, a lingering malaise settling heavily over him.

Fuel, medical scan, sanitize. After that, First Aid can tackle the problem of what to actually do when he arrives at the abandoned Cybertronian craft. For now, he needs to focus on bite-sized, actionable tasks.

He closes his hands into fists and presses them hard into his thighs, triggering the haptic feedback, a feeling just short of pain. The sensation is grounding. One ventilation cycle follows without movement, then another, and another. At the count of five, he releases the pressure, leaving his external sensors active, awake, alert.

First Aid calls up the data again and examines it carefully. There's no identifying information on the beacon, the kind of generic, last ditch emergency frequency that goes out during engine failure or major ship system collapses, but the crew protocol could include long term cryopod storage.

It's not entirely out of the realm of possibility, no matter how slim, the crew could've put themselves into long term stasis. It was protocol. And if the cryo system's power didn't fail —

First Aid raises his head and looks back into the shuttle.

His search and rescue tools are organized neatly in a set of storage lockers adjacent to the airlock. His medical supplies are topped off and he has several emergency berths that can be set up in the cargo hold. It'll be cramped and uncomfortable for survivors, but serviceable.

First Aid considers briefly it could be a baited trap, but his route is well outside the common merchant lanes and the message doesn't have any of the characteristic hallmarks of a pirate or raider — no piteous, glitching message begging for aid, no intentionally shoddy encoding, and no badly broken Neocybex cobbled together from salvaged linguistic dictionaries.

He pops the top on a cube of energon and plugs himself into the medical scanner, looking unseeing out of the narrow port-side window into the inky emptiness of space while the computer works its way through his vital readouts.

The process is even less pleasant when his neuromechanical sensors feel like someone's recently run a belt sander over them, but it's safer to validate his internal results.

The report returns some mineral deficits. Minor wiring damage in his right ankle joint, the actuator a little sticky. A damaged data port is flagged as negligible. He downs a second cube of medical grade energon to help with the first issue. His self-repair will take care of the rest. He's had worse early thaws.

First Aid returns to the pilot's chair to monitor the approach from the main console bank. He's barely seated when the computer chimes an alert he's within scanning range of the abandoned ship. Not for the first time he considers retrofitting the old shuttle with a new integrated system, but he's lucky to have his own shuttle at all; it was gifted by a returning neutral in exchange for spark chamber repairs.

The short range scanner instantly returns useful data from the docking access frequency, but no actual answer to his digital knock except for an automated acknowledgment.

First Aid presses the comms button with one hand and activates the recorder with his other. "This is First Aid aboard private vessel G-1392, medical transport shuttle, responding to your distress signal with emergency assistance. Requesting immediate boarding to supply medical aid. Please reply if able."

He waits a moment, no response forthcoming. An expected result.

He sets his hailing message to loop every five minutes on all frequencies and begins a deeper scan, then gets to work reviewing the data already he has available. He doubts conditions are going to appreciably worsen if he spends a little time digging around, not after four million years of sitting dead in space.

The stranded ship is the Acid Rain, a prison transport bound from Cybertron with a cargo of nine hundred and thirty eight prisoners against roughly a hundred crew and half as many guards. The ship is far too big for him to tow with far too many mechs for him to save even if they are still alive. At best, he can fit sixty mid-sized frames in the cargo hold if they're stacked end to end like bricks.

He flips through his shuttle's database to see if any of the data the Autobots skimmed from the Functionists has any better information.

It does, in fact: the Acid Rain was last spotted at the Luna 2 fueling hub, on schedule for delivery of prisoners to some mining planet near Black Block Consortia territory. It's a Class G prison transport, model 13-177T, rated for three hundred sparked prisoners, or up to two thousand in spark containment.

A queasy feeling of dread creeps back over First Aid. His spark sinks and his plating shivers, not from the cold but from the rising horror.

Spark containment. Spark containment. The containment facilities were always separately powered on ships like these; sustaining sparks in stasis was a simple business when there was little interest in their condition when they were reimplanted. Even worse than finding the crew suspended in cryo, the prisoners could still be alive in there, steeped in millions of years of blank sensory space, trapped with nothing but the noise of their own sparks.

The Autobots outlawed spark containment as a method of penal sentencing just after the war began. The only approved application is as an extraordinary lifesaving measure when a frame is too damaged to support a guttering spark and no replacement is available. He's reimplanted sparks in containment after only a few months and the emotional fallout for the patient had been nothing short of catastrophic.

Four million years.

He has no idea what that could do to a mech; there's no research available on the subject, because even the Functionist government didn't dump sparks into containment units indefinitely. The prisoners were slated for parole review in just over three centuries, the maximum allowable time in containment before temporary depersonalization starts looking worryingly permanent.

First Aid doesn't know if there will even be anything of them left to save, but he's never given up on a patient without trying.

He looks at the schematic of the ship and punches in an adjusted approach vector. The rear crew airlock looks like the most likely attachment point for his cargo shuttle. Even if the outer door is unresponsive, he can engage the external grav tractors and cut his way through with a little determination.

Like he suspected, the engine itself is offline, but when he accesses the public alerts there aren't any showing fire or explosive damage. These old pre-war transports were built around massive fusion reactors that could run for millions of years on low power if there were no manufacturing defects.

Downside is they exploded spectacularly when they did blow. He still remembers taking in overflow patients from the commercial shipyard outside of Staniz when an experimental model went up back in vorn 1312.7.

That ship had been a fifth this size.

"Sure," he says to himself out loud, his vocal synthesizer scratchy with disuse. He taps a stylus against the screen, agitated by his lack of intel. "Climb aboard the giant bomb to rescue mechs that are probably already so attenuated they won't know real from fake."

Except that's what First Aid is for. Emergency medical. Built to be able to keep trying, even when everything feels hopeless.

He pings the Acid Rain's comms suite and requests access to the crew and prisoner rosters.

The screen flashes: ACCESS DENIED: INSUFFICIENT CLEARANCE

First Aid skims through a few menus with ease of long practice. He has a bank of access codes and passkeys lifted from dead mechs and defunct ships during the war, a grisly little collection of stolen permissions collected over the length of the war. The ship is ancient, so there's no guarantee any of the Functionist security slag will actually work, but that's his most likely starting point.

On a hunch, he batches a few of the oldest Iaconian enforcer files and transmits the security key in each, one after the other. On the third attempt, the whole system rolls over for him, granting him basic crew access. He smiles grimly to himself.

He'll board the ship and do what he can. A plan begins to form.

If he finds the sparks in containment still viable, he can transport them back to Cybertron and figure out what to do with them from there. If there are crew still alive or in cryo, he can do what he can to fuel and repair them, then come back with a real search and rescue effort. At minimum, there will be plenty of Cybertronian salvage outfits interested in scraping the ship itself for technology.

Parts are hard to come by these days. It's difficult to find an extinguished frame with functioning parts and leave it undisturbed when your own fuel pump is failing with no replacement in sight.

The nav computer offers an update: nine minutes until rendezvous. Pain shoots through his frame and he grimaces, withdrawing from the console.

He blinks his optics clear again, pressing the heel of his palm into his brow to try to banish the lingering throb of being kept on ice for a few months. Reality still feels slightly oily, his thoughts muffled by the influx of data. He's still exhausted; cryostasis isn't anything comparable to good recharge and it certainly doesn't recommend itself next to a proper defrag cycle.

He unplugs, stands up, and goes to handle the scraping, empty feeling still lingering in his lines, picking up his discarded visor along the way. He still has his secondary and tertiary fuel holding tanks to refill and he's badly in need of coolant.

Full tanks means no returning straight to cryo for the remaining six day leg back to Cybertron, but he has an uneasy hunch he'll probably need them by the time he's sorted out this mess and gets back on course.

*

The Acid Rain first comes into view through the central cockpit window as a small blot of shadow against a background of faded starlight, a black patch rendered between the stars well before the shuttle's exterior cameras pick up any useful detail. Slowly, the hulk of metal resolves into a monument to Functionist hubris, the flat side emblazoned with the same gilded sigil of Primus the old Senate used to plaster on churches and bombs alike.

The massive, beetle black ship is nearly two kilometers long, the rectangular nose filling the viewscreen and stretching away into a cloud of accreted dust. The fore floodlights of his shuttle do almost nothing to illuminate the vessel, rays muddied and refracted by space debris. A sheen of ice coats the surface of the ship in irregular patches.

First Aid pings the Acid Rain's docking hub and receives an immediate reject even with his valid passkey. He frowns and digs around in the system notifications, dismissing error messages one after another as quickly as they surface.

He scans the return databurst, drumming his fingers on the console as he tries to make sense of the readouts. Quarantine protocols are firmly in place, but when he queries for the source of the lockdown, the prison ship returns ERROR in flashing yellow glyphs. No additional information forthcoming.

The Acid Rain's emergency life support systems are surprisingly close to nominal for the age of the ship and the level of deterioration — which is to say, not great, but tolerable.

Damage reports roll in one after another when he queries monitoring logs. Small hits by space debris over a long enough period of time inevitably mean pinhole punctures everywhere in the outer hull, but the main transit corridors and core facilities seem to have missed the worst of it. At least two major sections are missing along a transverse plane, suggesting larger impacts at some point, but the adjoining corridors are sealed off with functioning blast doors. Interior positive pressure appears to be intact in sixty seven percent of the ship.

There are a few alerts for emergency power protocols, but the grav and life support are still working at minimal safe operating standards. Even most of the elevators work, according to the ship's internal monitoring, and if he needs between-deck transit without taking a freight lift, there's ample cabling and anchor hooks in the shuttle's supplies.

None of the data solves for why the quarantine is in effect.

First Aid twiddles his stylus, processor grinding away at the mystery.

He stares at the flashing warning message with a sense of mild consternation. As much as most mechs don't like to compare themselves to non-sapient machines, fixing a ship is a lot like fixing a mech: diagnosis first.

"What are you hiding?" he mutters, tapping his stylus impatiently on the console.

He rises restlessly and rouses on each station with a touch — astrogation, communications, engineering, medical — leaning over the empty stations to attach each of the controller programs with the Acid Rain's data banks. There are four million and more years of sensor and security data to scrape through. Dividing it up is only practical. First Aid isn't rated for that kind of information intake, but the shuttle's computers can handle it without compromising primary functions.

Back at the main console, First Aid slots his filtration mask on, engaging his personal medical protocols, and runs a manual comparison against all known contaminants, calibrating for a range of atmospheric conditions. It takes a few minutes to get through every potential match he has in his personal memory banks.

The results pop up on his visor HUD, a single line bounded by an error label: NO KNOWN MATCHES.

No dangerous gasses, no corrosives, no known harmful biologics. Not even any false positives. Just silence and the discomfiting glow of the text on the main console. He runs the sweep a second time, half speed, but the root cause of the quarantine remains stubbornly inconclusive.

The structure of the ship itself interferes with anything other than short range scanning, limited to the outermost passageways. The Acid Rain's systems themselves are of dubious efficacy. Most likely, he won't be able to get a completely accurate reading until he's already swimming in whatever atmospheric concoction has been brewing inside the ship that may have triggered the lockdown.

A ship this old, it could be a bad sensor reading kicking the whole system into high alert. Passive radiation, damage to the hull, decaying wiring. From the ice cloud it's floating in, a breach in the wrong sensitive sector might easily play havoc with the ship's entire environmental monitoring suite. The Acid Rain's onboard atmospheric control could very well be functioning so poorly it's hallucinating some carcinogen.

Delphi springs back to the forefront of his processes without warning.

He pushes the memory away irritably, a little too late to avoid triggering the accompanying mechanical reaction. His spark contracts and he can feel his fluid pressure drop, a swooping anxiety, before he manages to shunt the aching resentment and rising anger into the background.

Delphi isn't relevant. There's slim to no chance there's some engineered affliction on board an abandoned prison transport; the Functionists were making mechs into weapons as covert projects, not weaponizing substances. Whatever triggered the lockdown is probably incidental or accidental. There's even a missing evac jumper, which makes him suspect the guards might have all successfully abandoned the ship.

A report from engine monitoring supports the theory. Main propulsion is offline, source of shutdown unknown. No one bothered to log a repair request before the Acid Rain was abandoned.

He cycles through the comms frequencies again, flicking rapidly through channel after channel to repeat his broadcast. Still nothing, no response. He leaves the monitoring on, tapping into the Acid Rain's security systems. Swiping through the cameras in common areas — low sec, low res monitoring units positioned in transit corridors and living spaces — doesn't turn up much. All he sees are dim, empty rooms if he's lucky enough to get a working video feed, less than one out of a hundred displaying anything more than an error code.

There are thousands, not all of them on the main circuit. First Aid doesn't have time to try them all, so he downloads the Acid Rain's schematics to his main memory and locates his target: spark containment and the adjacent frame storage facility.

He expands the internal map in three dimensional processing space, flicking it from side to side in his mind, and then runs a few routing operations through the replicated corridors.

There's a promising corridor routing from the crew airlock, passing through the unoccupied brig cells, and joins another near the climate control hub. From there it's down four decks to the spark containment facility, which sits adjacent to medbay.

He marks secondary and tertiary routes for egress and tilts the layers back and forth a few times, triple checking he didn't miss anything critical. No amount of planning will guarantee he won't have to go climbing over piles of debris or collapsed walkways, but having alternates might mean he won't get stuck in some dark pit with no hope of a quick rescue.

First Aid pauses over the displays. Sparks in containment were often shipped with the frames they were sentenced in. There was no guarantee those frames were the ones they'd get when their sentence was served. Functionists had a bad habit of prematurely recycling prisoner frames with military or mining capabilities.

The war did a lot of harm. There are a few bright spots. Not tossing sparks directly into frames already calibrated to someone else's spark frequency was one of them.

His shuttle's cargo space is mostly empty now, aside from a few crates of personal effects brought back from the fledgling colony on Polaris. Almost all of the equipment he brought with him on the trip was left behind — medical supplies, tools, digital media, supplements nearly impossible to source on the colony in decent quantity.

First Aid still has his search and rescue supplies. For once, he's glad old wartime habits die hard. There's hardly a need for pulling POWs out of Decepticon labor camps or downed craft in active war zones these days, but it still pays to be prepared in an emergency.

He pulls open the equipment locker and takes stock of the supplies on hand. The shuttle is stocked for any standard rescue operation, even if he's missing a few of his preferred tools. A heavy duty plasma cutter sits front and center and he removes it and sets it aside on the work bench after double checking fuel canisters are seated correctly and the ignition mechanism is functional.

First Aid doesn't anticipate needing it. It'd be useful to pop the hull or clear debris, but it's too unwieldy to carry in his standard kit. He'll leave it prepped in case he runs into a collapsed sector he can't safely route around.

He hefts a utility carrier out and slings the harness over both shoulders, adjusting the straps so they sit evenly across his plating. The material chafes unpleasantly across a transformation seam, but it'll have to do in place of a proper search and rescue kit.

The heavy duty coil of belay cable, each end hung with heavy duty maglocks, sits in the fore of the supplies locker. The attachment points can be activated to secure fifty tons of weight.

With a twinge of regret, he thinks of his search and rescue efforts after the space engagement near Luna 2, early in the war, when most of his assigned battalion had been blasted out of an airlock by a Decepticon warship. He'd barely known them, but he'd liked them well enough to mourn the casualties longer than the average slagged Cybertronian.

It's been long enough he'd have to dredge his memory banks to remember what they looked like. Even the mechs he'd managed to save during their EVA rescue are long extinguished.

First Aid isn't sure when he grew numb to the losses. It seemed like he'd never get used to it, but at some point they touched him less and less. The raw memory files are still there, aching, but the feeling only crops up in moments like these, rising like trapped oil surfacing from deep water.

An abundance of caution prompts First Aid to attach the cable. He clips on several carabiners beside it, followed by a wide, braided tow strap, sturdy enough he could haul two mechs at once in a pinch. After that, a few standard pieces of equipment: his personal trauma kit, medical grade energon quick fuel packs, tubes of coolant, and a heavy duty pry bar.

First Aid hefts it in his hand. The weight is comforting; old fashioned, but reliable. He's used a thousand exactly like it.

He hooks a lantern onto a carabiner near his waist and a handheld spotlight gets tucked into one of the shoulder mounted tool loops. The blaster feels heavy in his hand when he pulls it out of the small munitions locker. He racks it alongside two backup energy cartridges on his hip, just in case.

First Aid makes his way back to the front of the ship and settles into the captain's chair. One more precaution to take.

He presses the recording button a second time. "This is First Aid, captain and sole occupant of medical transport shuttle G-1392. I'm responding to a distress beacon transmitted by a derelict Cybertronian ship found at my location, coordinates attached. In the event I'm unable to return safely to my shuttle, this message is set to auto-send thirty hours after boarding. Please route any assistance."

He confirms the recording and schedules it to broadcast to the Luna 2 space station. Any aid coming direct from Cybertron would take a week or more to arrive, but planetary dispatch would more likely reroute a ship from a local transit lane.

First Aid checks the shuttle's status panel, more out of habit than real concern, and toggles the autopilot off. He's hanging stationary some three kilometers away from the Acid Rain, close enough for manual flight, so he eases the controls forward, maintaining minimum speed. There's some debris in the field, but it's all small enough it skates off the shuttle's hull without so much as scuffing the meteor shielding.

At one klik, he kills the primary thrusters and swings the shuttle parallel to the Acid Rain's crew airlock, coasting the remaining distance on momentum.

A proximity warning appears on his visor HUD, but proximity is exactly what he's looking for. He dismisses the alert and taps the port-side impulse thrusters twice, adjusting his tilt to compensate for the slope of the Acid Rain's hull relative to his current position.

Everything aligns, a careful, delicate dance, like splicing sensory lines. He skims his fingers quickly over the controls, doing the work of three mechs to set the autopilot to maintain a precise distance and initiate the remainder of the docking sequence. His shuttle isn't made to connect to the aperture of the old, freighter style airlocks, so he extends grav lock cabling, latching on to the side of the Acid Rain like a barnacle.

As the gangway tunnel slowly extends along the connection and makes a seal over the Acid Rain's airlock, First Aid thinks about Cybertron. If there's anyone left alive on the ship, it'll be an entirely alien world to them when they return.

His modest hab back in Iacon seems so distant to him, even though it's been years since the rebuilding began in earnest. The clinic is more familiar, comforting. He started it with nothing more than an emergency medical tent and grew it quickly into a sagging, badly-stocked building.

Most of his early patients had been Decepticons, creeping in cautiously from the fringes of the planet to visit him by virtue of his good reputation alone.

It's a little funny, he thinks, how it seems to have worked itself out. His small repair stop had been more of a comfort to the downtrodden than the polished facilities Ratchet set up under the auspices of the old Autobot Command. He left Ratchet to the unnavigable mire of funding and appropriations and went where there was a need.

Except, when he left on the outbound leg of his trip to the colonies, an entire medical complex was slowly rising out of the dirt, surrounded by paved roads and shops selling detailing services and consumer imports from the spaceport. When he returns, he'll have a proper treatment facility to open, staff, and stock. All of it on his own means, from paying patients or private funding.

First Aid should be looking forward to it, but it still seems somehow insufficient.

The computer chimes to let him know the docking sequence is complete. He brings up the status on his HUD and initiates atmospheric pressurization of the tunnel.

The indicator light flickers a few times and then solidifies, holding steady. First Aid hits the internal airlock controls and rises from the pilot's chair.

*

First Aid steps into the tunnel, keeping his filtration mask tightly sealed. His visor is slotted into place and feeding him real time data about his own vitals and the ambient atmospheric conditions. He doesn't need to look at the readouts; the air is uncomfortably humid, dark liquid already trickling down the metal ribbing on the tunnel walls and puddling beneath the grating of the gangway.

The artificial gravity weakens halfway through.

First Aid's gait turns slippery and he loses purchase in the few seconds it takes the mag attachments on his feet to engage. He bobs forward in near zero-g and comes down gracelessly on one foot, catching the railing to keep his balance, and then lands securely on the other side of the gap. His fuel pump gurgles as the atmospheric pressure shifts, but he's done spacewalks hundreds of times, so he squeezes his plating down and compresses the hydraulics in his legs until the feeling dissipates.

He can't shake the feeling he shouldn't be boarding alone, which means his basic sense of self-preservation is still healthily intact, but time and entropy are working against him. His feet carry him forward with a sense of growing urgency, a sudden, anxious sense he needs to hurry or something terrible will happen.

A few more steps brings him right up to the outer hull of the Acid Rain. The heavy metal around the airlock is pitted, dull grey where the exterior has worn away with time and the debris cloud. Frost curls in thick swirls on the outer viewport.

Not knowing what's on the other side of the airlock is always his least favorite part of search and rescue. Even good plans fall apart when they meet the unknown and his plan is less than solid.

The outer airlock door opens with the authorization code he skimmed, stale atmosphere flooding the tunnel. He waits for the pressure to equalize, the initial blast of air so cold he's puffing steam out of his vents even though he's still running below his baseline temperature.

His sensors don't detect any kind of contaminants, but the scent of water is so strong he can detect it even through his filtration mask. First Aid steps inside the airlock door closes automatically behind him, sealing him into the damp and dark. For a moment, nothing happens, and he tries not to allow the feeling of being sealed into a tomb encroach on his rational thinking.

First Aid waits, cycling fuel slowly, measured. The control console blinks dimly through security routines, errors out, and then automatically reinitiates.

It's not the first time First Aid's been in derelict like this and he doubts it'll be the last someone finds. The war left detritus like this scattered far and wide across Cybertronian space, ships that disappeared en route, marked as Missing in Action, the risk too high to mount a rescue without solid positional intel.

He wonders how much of pre-war Cybertron is entombed in those lost ships. If there are holovids and personal items and little pieces of a life long lost to someone who abandoned ship or died, all floating in an abyss, frozen in a time capsule.

The outer control panel light turns a friendly green, the door healing with a hiss, and he hurries forward to the interior door's console, punching in a medical override that'll allow him to board even with the quarantine. It asks him to confirm twice. There's a soft beep and the sound of a lock unlatching deep in the mechanics.

The interior airlock door stays stubbornly shut. First Aid suppresses a sigh.

He examines the panel with his spotlight. The wiring is still intact and powered, so there must be some sort of internal problem with the mechanism, a flaw with the door motor. He peers through the interior viewport, shining his light through it, but can't see anything obstructing it on the opposite side. He flips open the emergency access and plugs in a short data cable, entering his medical override a second time.

The panel beeps and flashes orange with an error message, confirming the door is unlocked but the mechanics are jammed.

"Right. The old fashioned way it is," First Aid says, sweeping his light over the door. Dust swirls in the beam of light.

First Aid feels along the seam of the airlock door, considering, and then wedges the flat end of his pry bar between the connector seam where the maglock is disengaged. It's the weight of the door still holding it closed, but when technology fails, brute force usually does the trick.

He braces his shoulder against the door housing and pulls, his hydraulics engaging at full strength with a deep mechanical whine. The cables in his hands and arms start to feel the strain, metal groaning with the effort as his plating shifts, interlocking to reinforce the underlying struts. The door resists, but he's twenty tons of pure towing strength, so there's a long moment of nothing and then a sudden, deep grinding in the airlock's internal mechanics.

All at once it pops open. The monitoring sensors in his filtration mask beep with a particulate warning, the air so thick with humidity his hands come away damp where he touches the metal. He steps inside, strapping the pry bar back onto hip. Emergency power is still on at the monitoring station, a dim amber pool of light, but the darkness is oppressive, so he flips his spotlight back on and scans left and right before he enters.

There's always something eerie about derelict ships, husks of a space once lively and lived-in, but the bare metal grating and utilitarian construction give the Acid Rain a particularly grim air. The shipwrights didn't consider crew comfort in the design.

Standard Functionist fare — strip down everything to minimal, utilitarian components, a brutal approach to design informed only by points of absolute failure.

Long hallways stretch away into an encompassing gloom. The dim emergency lights only illuminate small circular patches that make it nearly impossible to see if the walkways have been damaged. First Aid picks his way down the corridor carefully, testing the metal underfoot, his spotlight casting a raft of light in an ocean of darkness.

In some places the blackness is so thick it almost seems to move. He shines his light into the corners and it melts away, revealing nothing more ominous than some dripping pipe or aging, corroded span of metal. His optical sensors play tricks on him and he fruitlessly chases empty shadows before giving up on the effort.

First Aid wonders briefly if this is what a mecharat feels like being pursued through a warren by a wireviper. His latest scans are free of any sort of spark signatures or organic life signs in this sector, but it doesn't help him shake the feeling something might slither out of a broken pipe or duct.

Spark containment is six levels down and half a klik's walk towards the belly of the ship, so he picks up his pace as much as he dares. The closest passenger lifts he checks are all unresponsive, despite being marked as functional on the Acid Rain's internal network — burnt out machine drives, maybe.

His luck doesn't run dry that quickly: the freight lift he flagged on his internal map is working for the low price of some slight backtracking and a detour around a section of collapsed walkway through the general inmate holding facility.

He makes it to the prisoner cells without encountering any obstructions. They're all open and empty; if this particular ward ever had inhabitants, they're long gone by now. He pauses next to one and lays his hand on the broken control panel, peering inside curiously. The berth inside is collapsed at one end, but the cell is otherwise untouched.

There's another guard station at the end of the corridor, nothing more than a low check-in counter barred off with wide trithyllium bars. The inactive hardlight projectors ringing the opening would've provided an additional layer of security. The air is thick with silica dust disturbed by his passage, swirling through the beam of light as he swings it across the junction, the suspended debris glittering like tiny crystals.

The effect plays optical tricks on his sensors; the darkness seems to oscillate at the very edges of the light.

First Aid shines his spotlight inside. There's a data pad left unsecured on the workstation just out of easy reach. From his vantage point, he can't tell if it's a personal device or work equipment abandoned in haste in an effort to make it to the missing escape pod.

He maneuvers up against the bars, flattening his plating down as tightly as he can so his forearm fits through the gap. It's a near thing, the rusting metal scraping at his paint, and he has to brace himself on the outer lip of the window to squeeze the extra decimeter of reach out of his overextended shoulder joint.

His fingers graze the corner of the data pad but he can't quite get a grip on it.

First Aid repositions one more time, pushing hard, the bars straining against his weight. The aging metal gives a single centimeter, and then another, and he snags the lip of the data pad with the very tip of one finger, dragging it closer.

A surge of triumph goes through him when he closes his hand firmly around it and liberates it from the locked guard post.

There's a sudden cacophony of sound, crashing metal, as loud as blaster fire in the enclosed space.

First Aid yanks his hand back, data pad securely gripped, and backpedals with a hiss of escaping air. When he finally realizes nothing is leaping out at him, his plating is already flared in surprise, fuel pump pounding double time. He shines his spotlight back into the guard booth and only finds one end of the desk collapsed, the bracket anchoring the legs corroded away. It must have been ready to crumble at the slightest disturbance.

He chuffs a laugh, some of the terror dissolving into a tense uneasiness. At least there's no one here to see him looking foolish.

First Aid flips the data pad over and attempts to power it on — the internal power source long dead, the charging connector corroded with age. Maybe he can extract the data from it using his shuttle equipment. He hopes it's worth keeping for the mild embarrassment it took to obtain it.

He tucks it into his subspace and smooths down his plating and, if only to satisfy himself nothing is there, looks behind him, spotlight raised.

Nothing. Meters and meters of nothing and darkness. A low, insidious dread encroaches: He has a terrible feeling he's going to get down to the spark containment facility and discover there's nothing worth finding after all.

It's not worth speculating about. There'll be something to find or there won't. He rubs a layer of particulate off the outer intake of his filtration mask, blowing out dust from the exhaust, and continues down the corridor.

As he takes the freight elevator down and approaches the spark containment facility, the overhead lighting grows brighter, better lit and in significantly better repair. These facilities usually run off an independent power source; the problems plaguing the rest of the ship aren't as evident here. No rusty condensation dripping from the walls, no pooling patches of fluid, no temperature control issues.

The door to the secure medical ward slides open soundlessly when he approaches. He pauses, skimming his light across the entrance, but there's nothing out of the ordinary to suggest someone's forced entry. The security keypad is still intact. It's simply unlocked, the entire facility unsecured.

A glitch, maybe, or bad wiring. A tension settles over his dorsal plating, drawing them tight, along with the strange feeling someone has been here before. He checks the access logs and finds nothing out of the ordinary.

He passes through and is greeted by the familiar sight of medbay signage. This, at least, is familiar ground. Unusually so — he doesn't recall that the old Functionist prison ships were ever outfitted with anything quite so expensive as this. The directory sign indicates there's a science facility on board, further down the hallway, but it's unlabeled on the main map.

He dismisses his unease. Ships were often retrofitted. Schematics weren't always updated.

First Aid slows as he approaches his destination, the sound of his footfalls hollow and metallic in the empty corridors. A swell of trepidation fills him, an unpleasant clenching around his spark. His spotlight dips towards the floor and then angles up towards the signage above the door.

SPARK CONTAINMENT is printed above the entrance in heavy black glyphs. The main door is stuck half-open, jammed when he tries the controls, the gap barely wide enough for a mech roughly his size to make it through sideways. The prickling feeling of being watched intensifies and he swings his light from side to side down the hallway, trying to banish the feeling he's being followed.

It's just jitters. He doesn't want to go in, because that means the chance of survivors is finally going to come down one way or the other. Dead or alive. At some point his speculation module started churning out possibilities instead of probabilities.

He has no idea what he's actually going to find inside after this long, but not knowing is the worst part. Best to get it over with quickly. He lingers at the threshold for a moment, steeling himself for the worst case scenario, and then squeezes inside.

*

First Aid unclips the lantern from his harness, activates it, and sets it on the closest workbench. The glow refracts through the thick haze of moisture filling the room, diffusing so even the air seems to glow. The atmospheric handler groans overhead, a sickly noise that’s probably also the source of the cloying humidity.

He wipes his plating and his fingers come away unpleasantly damp.

The room is large enough he can't make out the rear wall. Secure storage shelves line either side of a long, narrow walkway leading back to several repair stations.

First Aid finds he's nearly forgotten how spark containment used to be handled. He'd only been to a facility once during his Academy rotation, shadowing a blacksmith using spark containment prisoners to study the effects of frame deintegration. The results had been grisly.

He'd wanted to purge his tanks after seeing the readouts and a queasy feeling had lingered in his fuel pump during the monthlong rotation. That hasn't changed. First Aid dismisses the query, smothering the urge.

The metal doors rise with a hydraulic hiss, punctuated by a grating rattle at the apex. He waits, tense, then takes a step forward, uncertain at first if what he's seeing is real.

The spark containment canisters are all present in their housings, powered, the indicators a steady green. Hope surges through him, a blaze of feeling that eclipses and cracks his carefully constructed pragmatism — until it all comes crashing down, the wrongness of it evident the moment he realizes the canisters aren't opaque.

They're empty. One after the other, all gone dark.

He turns his light on the row closest to him; the seals are popped, lights extinguished, the sparks that were once inside long ago guttered. Some of the acrylic is blackened with smoke from the last, dying blazes of energy.

First Aid reaches out and picks up an empty container, soot darkening his fingertips, and stares down at it as a wave of horror passes over him. The emergency power is on, but it might not have been maintained the entire time. He scans the data chip on the housing. The mech inside was put away for theft turned assault. Nothing warranting a death sentence.

With great care, he returns each canister to its housing.

He stands there looking and then moves on to the next row of shelves, then the next. A hundred empty canisters line each cabinet, a floor-to-ceiling testament to Functionist negligence. The Acid Rain isn't a derelict: it's a wartime tomb.

All of these sparks could have been saved by someone thinking to check the flight logs on both ends and noticing the Acid Rain had never made it to its destination. Between the prisoners and crew, a thousand odd lives snuffed out in what amounted to nothing more than equipment failure and an accounting error.

A heavy grief descends on him. Even now, with the colonists and neutrals returning, refugees from a thousand worlds, Cybertron isn't so well populated it would miss the absence of this many sparks.

Criminals or not, their sentences were served tenfold.

First Aid braces himself against the nearest shelf and thinks unwillingly about Ambulon laying cold and dark on a repair table, frame finally whole again but still sparkless. Despair hits him before he can push the memory away and the loss here magnifies it. His intake constricts and he scrubs a hand over his face; a tight knot of sorrow takes root in his chassis and he can't seem to be rid of it.

He's come to understand Cybertronians are built badly for grief. They're long-lived, death slow-coming and difficult. First Aid has made enough study of organics to understand some of the complex fluid-bound electrical functioning of their bodies. Emotion felt in current, passed through water and carbon instead of metal and wire.

Right now, First Aid envies them their tears. Even though the war is over, the well of sorrow in him is still so deep it's like standing knee deep in a lake of tar. If he allows it to pull him in, he might never be free again.

He rubs along the edge of his filtration mask, wiping away condensation collecting on his plating. First Aid can't stay here with the dead with the living still relying on him.

If there's no one here for him to save, he might as well check cold storage and see if the frames are intact. Returning with a load of medical salvage will improve at least as many lives as were lost here. The thought finally loosens the tight feeling around his spark and he pushes the rest of his melancholy away. An abandoned, dangerous ship isn't the place to grieve. He has work to do.

First Aid walks slowly down the line of shelves towards the connecting door leading into the frame storage facility. A flicker in his visor's HUD gives him pause.

There's a blip on his scanner, a fluttering energy signature.

First Aid freezes at the doorway. He checks the display and watches carefully, not daring to hope. There — a second time, a soft signal that scatters through the room and diffuses between rows and rows of cold metal and hard acrylic. First Aid can't pinpoint the precise location; it only grows more chaotic and scattered the deeper he moves into the room.

He cuts his spotlight and waits for his optics to recalibrate. The faint shimmer of his own biolights illuminate only the smallest space around him, but he dims them as much as he can manage. Every sound feels louder and more scraping in the absence of light, the darkness almost crushing. He waits, his intake flexing as he swallows.

First Aid catches a glimmer at the peripheral of his optical input: there. A faint blue glow near the back of the far row, a shimmering light obscured by a dozen other empty canisters. A single prisoner still alive, a dim little star in the murk. His own spark leaps, his fuel pump racing. The sound of his own ventilations grow ragged and he can't stop himself from staggering forward a single step.

He reaches up and removes his filtration mask, the cloying smell of old standing water instantly encroaching his olfactory sensors. First Aid cycles cold atmosphere through his tertiary vents, sucking it in through his mouth and blowing it across his processor.

First Aid feels momentarily rooted. So many terrible things can be wrong with a spark left in containment this long. His processor occupies itself with all of the worst case scenarios: total personality attenuation, intense and unresolvable frame dysphoria, violent impulses, psychotic episodes, critical memory loss, even outright frame rejection.

There's a chance. There's a chance whoever's in the containment canister is simply dormant, fallen into a long recharge, an endless cycle of rest and flux. If there's even a flicker of hope, he has to make the attempt.

His feet carry him to the spark without conscious instruction from his processor. It floats between two of the four remaining power conductors, spinning and flickering with a sedate, almost sleepy pulse. He closes his hands around the canister and lifts it from the cradle, the tiny green power source light flicking over to hazard orange. Even through the thick acrylic, little crackles of static lick towards his fingertips, trying to conduct.

His internal temperature monitor gives a warning beep and he sucks in a ventilation he didn't realize he'd been suppressing. Wisps of steam curl out from his exhaust vents while he rubs his thumb across the dusty face of the containment canister. Beneath, it's so bright it cuts the darkness around it.

It looks perfect. Medically, he couldn't ask for a healthier-looking spark — a beautiful, luminous blue, the shade right out of an anatomical diagram. He flicks on his spotlight and casts about for the door to frame storage. He spots it on the opposite side of the room; a swinging double door big enough to admit a heavy combat frame.

He'll do the implantation here. The Acid Rain's medical facilities are much larger than his own ship's, and he isn't exactly keen on hauling an empty frame all the way back up through aging, hazardous walkways.

And if the prisoner wakes too far gone, well — a few clipped wires and the right amount of pressure on the fuel pump would be a mercy.

First Aid swiftly sets the grim thought aside.

"All right," he says, scanning the ident chip embedded into the canister. A little prompt pops up on his visor HUD: Prisoner ID: 135-19717.G. Vortex. A cold constructed mech built in Altihex and last arrested in Rodion, originally framed as a rotary.

Vortex's criminal record is attached. The file size isn't small.

He skims it, then saves it and Vortex's medical records to main memory to look over while he works. With a practiced optimism he doesn't quite feel, he says to the spark containment unit, "Vortex. Let's see if we get you up and running."

First Aid presses his thumbs to the tube. The spark inside crackles sedately. The implantation process is fairly straightforward. The first step is finding a frame for Vortex to inhabit, ideally his original. First Aid cradles the canister securely against his chest plating, ignoring the buzzing tingle of static that occasionally pops against his fingertips even through the heavy canister, and steps through the door into the frame storage.

Rows of cryopods line wide service corridors; old fashioned pre-war relics, meant for deep storage, flooded with hyper-cooled gasses instead of liquid antifreeze. They work far better than the small shuttle tubes, but their compressors make them huge and unwieldy to transport. There are a handful of heavy duty transport carts strapped against the nearby bulkhead, but half of the wheels look like they rusted through hundreds of thousands of years ago.

As he passes, he shines his light inside, the shapes of empty frames like dark shadows in their pods. Six rows down, he finds Vortex.

He swipes his hand across the foggy acrylic, exposing a slice of Vortex's frame. Wide shoulders, constructed for combat, folded blades, and a face rendered stark in the shadows.

First Aid matches the serial number to the dormant frame and kneels on the floor in front of the cloudy stasis pod, the canister braced between his knees as he examines the criminal charges from the Acid Rain’s prisoner records.

Public intoxication, solicitation, interface deviance, arson, booster use, booster trafficking, siphoning, assault, aggravated battery, smuggling, bribery. First Aid flips past several pages of individual counts of fraud and theft, each more absurd and elaborate than the last. Politically motivated property damage.

Two recorded counts of murder; one an enforcer.

Not a law abiding citizen, but First Aid knew that from the outset. Pulling up his sentencing data makes First Aid's plating itch. He's overdue for release by about three point eight million years.

First Aid touches the top of the containment canister with the tips of his fingers. The spark is bright, the blue glow strong and steady, oscillating at a frequency that feels correct to First Aid.

He begins the thawing sequence. Atmosphere hisses through the tube, evacuating through some exhaust pipe, and the heavy pod folds open vertically, leaving Vortex's frame exposed for inspection.

The frame itself is in good repair at first glance; kept in uninterrupted cryostasis, bathed in hyper-cooled gasses, an undamaged Cybertronian frame can last nearly indefinitely. There's no surface damage or evidence of rust. The readouts on the control panel are a steady green. First Aid climbs to his feet, setting the spark containment canister carefully aside, and reaches into the open chamber.

He does a quick manual exam, lifting and articulating limbs, testing for weak spots, checking ports and maintenance hatches. The transformation seams move normally when he puts weight on them, offering a healthy amount of flex and give. The frame is in as perfect condition as First Aid could hope for.

First Aid lifts one hand in his, the metal painfully cold against his sensitive fingers, and runs a thumb across the tips of the claws, considering. He decides he'll do the implantation here rather than haul twenty odd tons of unwieldy, dormant metal back up through the corridors.

The whole situation is increasingly strange. A solitary spark, the missing escape shuttle, the unexplained quarantine. None of it seems to quite add up.

He steps back and shines his light down the line of frames, frowning. There are rows and rows of hulking war machines, all with combat alt modes. This wasn’t some labor colony shipment with a few military spec mechs sprinkled in — most likely, these were all mechs meant to go die on some war front.

First Aid tries to access the Acid Rain's high security files again and gets the same blunt, immediate reject. He suppresses a sigh. Looks like if he wants to know more about what happened here, he'll have to brute force his way into some kind of upper level security clearance. He's not sure he has the time or interest in doing so right now, but a few attempts won't slow him down much. If he fails, he can always request the data from whatever salvage team gets the contract.

He looks down at Vortex, frame and spark, then shunts his worry down into the queue as a task with moderate priority. Vortex first, and then the rest of the mystery.

Chapter Text

The temperature gauge on the cryopod begins ticking up steadily, but slowly. He can't complain when equipment a few million years old is working at all. Steam curls from vents in the side as the internal heater hums to full power.

At least the frame isn't submerged from head to foot in refrigerant slime. Small fortunes.

First Aid sheds his equipment, then paces back and forth a few times, metal drainage grating clanking faintly beneath his weight. He shakes off the growing feeling of unease, and because his processor needs something to occupy itself with, he double checks the spark canister is secure and makes the trek down to the other end of the facility to investigate the bank of electrical control panels.

The breakers for the medbay lights are tripped, a fuse blown. He finds a box of spares in a maintenance closet, old style cylindrical resistors, and begins replacing them, discarding the junked rods one by one on the deck.

First Aid hits the switch and the lights flicker on. It's not much better than having them off, half of the fixtures blown out, but he can ditch the handheld light.

The adjacent medbay is almost unusually well stocked with supplies, all unused but ancient, the cheaper plastics crumbling to dust when he touches them. Some of the cabinets have been invaded by moisture and the old enemy: rust. He closes them back up tightly, doing his best not to disturb the heavy layers of oxidization.

First Aid cleans while Vortex's energon and fluid systems reprofuse, clearing a thick layer of dust off an operating surface and sanitizing the metal. There's not much to be done about the general mess of the atmospheric filtration, but First Aid's replaced parts on so many hemorrhaging mechs in the dirt and mud of alien worlds he can't remember them all.

He can manage a spark implantation on a clean table in a damp and dingy ship.

First Aid thinks unexpectedly of Pharma, leaning over a patient, smiling thinly, reassuring some faceless, nameless MTO they'd be perfectly fine after their welds set. First Aid can't remember the patient, but he can remember the astringent smell of Delphi.

How clean Pharma always kept his hands.

Thoughts of Pharma always turn to thoughts of Pharma's death. First Aid can't ever seem to shake the feeling of hot energon on his face, the acrid burn in his lines, the echo of rage and despair. The misery of the memory doesn't have quite the same bite it used to, so he lets it sit with him, cold company in the gloomy medbay.

First Aid thinks maybe he should have made a different choice — but Pharma made the wrong ones first, over and over and over, and laughed in the face of it.

And Ambulon —

He retracts his filtration mask and rubs his hand over his bare face, the frosty air on his exposed mesh a sudden shock. The stale atmosphere is sharp with rust — moisture and decay. He sucks in a ventilation, passing it directly over his processing components, and feels steadier.

Before Ambulon was murdered, he'd thought he'd made an old friend of grief. He didn't know how terrible it could be. The thin thread of hope First Aid held onto was always anchored to the idea things were meant to be better after the war. Now it only seems like a different brand of suffering.

The alarm on the cryopod sounds, startling him out of his grim train of thought. Vortex's frame is back to a safe operating temperature. The sound, blaring in the quiet ship, hurries him along, and the silence after he toggles it off is ringing.

The pod hisses open, finishing depressurization. First Aid presses his tongue to the backs of his teeth, jaw clenched, a burst of nervousness scattering through him.

First Aid reaches in and negotiates Vortex out of the pod, tipping it partially over one shoulder. It dangles in his arms, heavy, no resistance in its limbs. He carries it to the cleared medical table and places it on the clean surface. Beside it, Vortex's spark sits suspended in the canister, glowing warmly, waiting, spinning idly.

Vortex.

He repeats the name a few times to himself, solidifying the identity in his processes. The frame isn't an unsparked MTO that's never been conscious, a piece of military hardware to be sparked and sent to die. This metal belongs to someone, has a lengthy lived mechanical memory.

Vortex's face is open and angular, eerily immobile but peaceful, and First Aid touches one smooth, cool cheek with his palm, trying and failing to imagine what Vortex will be like when his spark is reunited with his frame, whether he's serious or animated, if he's cruel or distant.

First Aid straightens Vortex's limbs with care, flattening stiff joints and smoothing slack plating, feeling along them for unseen damage as he works. Outwardly, Vortex's frame is in fantastic condition. He takes one hand in his and measures it; they're nearly of a size, Vortex's fingers less articulate, the tips ending in sturdy, utilitarian claws.

Impulsively, First Aid threads their fingers together. He's not the praying sort, but he hopes beyond hope that the mech in that canister is someone that will wake up relatively whole. First Aid remains like that, thinking hard and uncertain of what he's hoping for. Tense seconds become fearful minutes, until he shakes off the feeling and returns Vortex's hand to his side.

He plugs a diagnostic cable into a medical access port, getting a return ping. The sensation of a sparkless connection is discomfiting, but the readouts are nearly perfect. Minor nutritional deficiencies, but no major mechanical failures. Vortex’s frame is a time capsule of pre-war technology. Cold constructed, but not cheaply made. A blacksmith put some time and care into crafting his frame.

Vortex isn't cheap equipment meant to be abandoned on a battlefield; he's sophisticated weaponry. It gives him pause. There's nothing in his file to suggest a history of active military duty; he must have been commissioned for a specific function.

First Aid opens Vortex's chassis by triggering emergency medical access. Vortex's plating folds away beneath his touch, the empty spark chamber hissing as it depressurizes and parts.

He runs the sensor pads of his fingers over the exposed components, curious about the construction as much as he is about their state of repair. It's incredibly nonstandard. The kind of hardware he hasn't seen in millions of years outside special operations or private security.

"Who the frag are you?" First Aid mutters to himself.

The MTOs that characterized the bulk of Autobot and Decepticon infantry near the end of the war were made cheaply, with simple internal architecture, highly modular. In Vortex, the lines and tubes are all clean, with tidy, pretty loops and whorls of sensory clusters, spider-webbed nets of wiring draped elegantly throughout his internal structure.

He's constructed with at least much thought as a forged mech — his protoform is even adhered directly to the inside of his armor plating, the underlayment attached to the protoform providing anchor points for routing cabling to his extremities. The cabling attachment points are gorgeously done, providing ample space for his specialized sensory components.

Curious, First Aid draws his fingers along the underside a heavy bundle of sensory cabling, a touch reverently. He grazes a fingertip over bare sentio metallico. The edge of one of his fingertip sensors clips the raw material and a needle-thin databurst jolts up his arm, an unsigned and nonspecific handshake request.

That's a good sign, at least. He notes the general responsiveness in Vortex's growing medical file for later perusal.

It isn't at all like touching an unsparked mech, with all the electric impulses dormant. There's a faint crackle of energy from Vortex’s reactor, a low level hum of vitality even without Vortex's spark there to animate it.

The frame isn't the mech, but there's certainly something transmutative about sparked metal. The sentio metallico never really forgets how to exist as a living thing once it's been kindled. Never forgets how to reach out to another sparked mech.

First Aid's fingers skim along the inside of the open spark chamber. A sharp, almost painful jolt of static discharge jumps from the bare metal to his hand and he yanks it back, startled and oddly guilty. He huffs ruefully from his vents and shakes his plating back out, a gathering tightness in his fuel intake that makes him swallow reflexively.

He picks up Vortex's spark and holds the canister up at optic level, turning it, feeling a sudden burst of nervousness. It's stayed a strong, healthy blue, pulsing slowly. He's done thousands of implantations. He doesn't know why this one feels different.

There’s a brief flash of sense-memory, the feeling of energon running through his fingers. He shakes it off, old fragments of a moment he barely remembers. It’s a spark to go back into a body, clean and whole, not some ghost from his past.

He reaches into the containment chamber with one hand, cupping the spark carefully, and then turns it out into his palm, then sets the container aside. Vortex cradled in his hands is a thing of strange wonder, an electric buzz, a life hovering between his fingertips. It always feels slightly surreal to scoop someone's vital essence into his bare hands. First Aid allows himself a moment to process his emotional response, then places his feelings carefully aside, hands steady, unfaltering.

Vortex’s spark feels warm against his palms. Strong. Sparks don't really have much solidity to them and he feels an old familiar anxiety it might slip through his hands and dissipate. His fingers sink easily through Vortex's corona, contact with the bright core sending strange zings of static up his forearms. There's no actual data transfer, but the steady pulse of current is more than enough to make it feel intimate.

First Aid lowers the bare spark into Vortex's chassis, parting the cup of his hands so the glow slips between them and into the waiting basin of Vortex's spark chamber. Licks of static curl around his fingers and palms, bright, silvery waves of feedback that make First Aid's actuators twitch on pure impulse.

He slowly withdraws his hands. Fingers of energy arc through the chamber, reaching for First Aid, and then retreat all at once as the spark snaps into position against the conduit connecting it to the rest of Vortex's frame.

First Aid opens and closes his hands, trying to dispel the lingering sensation. Vortex's spark wobbles once, pivoting to align itself, and then his systems lurch to life one at a time.

It takes a while. Tiny bursts of electricity crackle across Vortex’s plating in waves as dormant connections rouse and complete startup testing. Vortex gasps through all of his vents at once, spinal strut arching dramatically, and his optics flicker online a deep red. They cycle through several shades, brightening and dimming, unseeing.

First Aid waits, counting out the seconds, watching to see if the spark finishes the final step of implantation or fails to connect and begins to fade. A tension begins to form beneath his own chest plating, a sympathetic clench at the sight of another mech's exposed spark struggling for purchase.

Vortex goes unnaturally still. First Aid takes a step forward, hand raised in concern, then freezes in place when he catches a burst of movement. Vortex's claws curl and uncurl, beginning the boot sequence that indicates his spark's made successful processor connection. First Aid darts forward and presses Vortex's chamber closed, the metal hot beneath his palms, and then coaxes the rest of Vortex's armor shut over it.

First Aid watches with fluttering anticipation as Vortex pushes himself slowly upright. He swings his legs over the edge of the table and sits, his hands resting loosely at his sides.

And then — nothing else. Seconds tick by without anything happening. An entire minute passes. Three. First Aid waits, frozen in place, hoping. A dim flicker of lights is the only indicator Vortex is animated.

Then, a twitch. Data syncing is arduous on the frame.

Vortex stares blankly, optics fixed straight ahead. First Aid steps closer, passing his open hand in front of Vortex's face. Vortex tracks the motion sluggishly, but there's no sensor reflex visible, the underlying apertures unfocused. First Aid frowns and touches his cheek to try to get a better look.

Claws snag in his arm, catching the edge of a plate and yanking. First Aid stumbles backwards in surprise. Vortex snarls, a low, feral turbine growl, then surges off the table after him and directly onto First Aid. First Aid yelps and is met with twenty plus tons of combat-trained mech bearing down on him, the impact of their frames together so hard it rattles his spinal strut painfully.

First Aid hits the deck with a crash, dragged down beneath Vortex's wildly flailing weight. Vortex hisses tonelessly, a rush of ventilated air, and only thrashes harder when First Aid tries to get a grip on him, making good use of his claws to rake across First Aid's plating. First Aid's head collides with the grating hard enough to rattle his optics, but he manages to pin one of Vortex's arms to his side, staying the assault from one direction.

It does nothing for the searing pain where Vortex's claws have already found purchase in a transformation seam, but it does give him a better grip to keep Vortex from hurting himself banging around on things that aren't First Aid.

He should be afraid, but Vortex isn't attacking him — there's no sense or reason to the clawing or the frantic noises working their way up out of Vortex's chassis, a whine of hardware strain. First Aid pries his arm free and hooks it around the back of Vortex's head, applying pressure, holding Vortex's face against his collar.

First Aid made a mistake not anchoring him. Four million years of data sync takes ages, so long that Vortex's primary proprioception systems can't be fully online yet. The disorientation must be immense for a mech with a dozen or more integrated gyroscopic functions relying heavily on them. Doubt lances through him. Another obstacle for him to coax Vortex past.

"Come on," First Aid says, urgency coloring his voice. "Come on, you've got this."

First Aid clamps a hand down over the base of Vortex's neck, right where it disappears under his fairing collar, and squeezes until he can feel the main sensory corridor compress beneath his fingers.

Vortex's struggling stops, so abruptly First Aid is afraid Vortex has lost motor control, but then he shudders from head to foot. There's an alarming clicking noise of some subvocal system engaging. At first, he thinks it might be Vortex's vocal synthesizer erroring out, but First Aid realizes he must have some sort of built in radar sensor. Vortex groans and buries his face miserably against First Aid's plating, scraping his claws loosely across metal until they catch on the edge of First Aid's armor. He holds on tightly, whining faintly.

"You’re all right," First Aid says, softer. He frees Vortex's trapped arm and presses his fingers into the base of Vortex's flight assembly to hold it firm, anchoring him. He strokes the back of Vortex's neck, soothing agitated haptics, letting his own engine rumble to life. "I've got you. You're safe."

Slowly, slowly, Vortex's rasping ventilations even out into a soft, purring hum. His vents cycle air across First Aid's plating at his throat and sides, humid and warm. It isn't unpleasant. His frame is large but light, and it fits neatly along First Aid's, his sloped chest nesting comfortably against First Aid's abdominal plating, his cheek over First Aid’s spark.

The anxiety First Aid was forcibly pushing aside melts away on its own. There's something of Vortex left. At least a fragment aware enough to accept comfort, even at a core processing level. First Aid will have to wait and see, but successful initiation of a recharge and defrag cycle is immensely promising. To have it happen instantaneously is almost unheard of.

First Aid puts a hand on his own side, investigating the damage. His paint is scraped and the edge of a transformation seam is dented in the shape of four heavy claws, a few centimeters deep, but Vortex didn't rip anything open. No energon. He'll take it in exchange for Vortex having an easier landing. It's hardly the worst damage he's suffered treating a panicked patient.

A few minutes trickle past and even First Aid starts to relax, his ventilations syncing with Vortex's and plating loosening. There's a low click and the last of the tension bleeds from Vortex's frame; he's slipped fully into defrag, twitching occasionally as his actuators trigger in test reflex sequences.

His biolights are sparing, but what he does have wink like stars in the recesses of his frame.

First Aid runs his knuckles lightly over the warm mesh of Vortex's cheek below the beveled edge of his visor. It jumps beneath First Aid's touch, Vortex's nose rumpling. Tactile reactivity is an extremely good sign. He has some sort of blast mask, but it's retracted beneath his armor plating, his chin and jaw bare, dark mesh with a pleasant-looking mouth. The knot in First Aid's fuel intake returns.

There’s good conformation to Vortex's facial mechanics, healthy fluid profusion in his vascularized plates. He has a sweet, clean smell to him — the mineral-heavy energon from deep storage. Zinc, copper, iron, and dozens of other trace nutrients. It's potent enough it triggers a sensory-linked memory and First Aid can practically taste it in his own mouth.

Cold constructed rotary frames were never particularly common before the war, more specialized and never made in large batches by the Functionist government like Seekers.

Whatever blacksmith designed the template for Vortex’s face took their time. He doesn't have any of the weirdly uniform beauty mass produced cold cons have, but he's sharply handsome, a little uneven and disproportionate. His armor plating has attachment points for a tactical visor and First Aid makes a note to look for it later. Vortex is vaguely angular near the chin, a suggestion of a nose pressed flat against First Aid's chest, a strong jaw, a generously expressive mouth.

It's open a little while he dozes, revealing the soft, silvery interior. He has fangs, one of the more ostentatious hallmarks of cold constructed combat frames. First Aid could flip a cred on a pre-war combat model getting them or not. They mostly make Vortex look slightly impish. Decepticons tended to maintain and replace them only as a matter of personal style. Autobots, not so much.

Not much practical need for lethal biting force when your enemies were in the habit of glassing your armies from orbit. Vortex's are the real deal.

Below his sharp face, Vortex's neck is a beautiful column of flexible mesh covering critical cabling. His fluid system configuration is a little unfamiliar; flight frames are all high performance parts and heavy duty electrical conduits, but Vortex’s components seem oddly delicate. His heavy collar fairing limits access, except from an angle that would require Vortex to tip his head back and allow it.

First Aid feels a strange stab of pleased fondness. He has no idea who this mech is, who he'll turn out to be, but he's alive. For once, all First Aid can think about is the warm frame in front of him, whole and buzzing with vitality, struggling back towards function.

He has no legitimate medical reason to touch the dip of Vortex’s throat where it vanishes beneath his collar. It's smooth and warm beneath his fingertips; First Aid can feel the thrum of his fluid systems, the pleasant gurgle of a fully fueled mech at rest. Vortex stirs and sighs, but doesn't rouse.

First Aid withdraws his hand at the electric feeling that crackles through him, unexpected, opening and closing it slowly, watching Vortex recharge with slightly baffled wonder.

*

The Harmonex Academy of Medicine was as prestigious a learning institution as a mech could find outside of Iacon proper. First Aid's first few years there were marked with a sense of trepidation and deep frustration.

Everything was a struggle for him when his cohort seemed to sail past each new challenge. He wasn't a failure. First Aid's assessments were adequate, his progress average, his repairs serviceable.

He wasn't a failure, but there was nothing in particular to recommend First Aid above his peers, who slowly specialized, acquired mentorships, were assigned to clinical rotations, and — in the final few years of the program — offered research fellowships and promises of career-making assignments.

The six month service rotation to the Coriolis-G82 mining colony changed his trajectory.

It was the first time he'd seen a real spark chamber injury. A massive drill operator, five times First Aid's size, had been hauled out of the mines and laid out on a slab with plating peeled away like something had tried to blow its way out from the inside.

He'd climbed up into the mech's chassis, prying slagged components out with his bare hands, working furiously. If he concentrates, First Aid can still smell the exact, potent reek of burnt energon and congealed oil, of sentio metallico electrified by the drill operator's exposed spark. He can even almost feel the caked rock grit on the trithyllium exoarmor below his fingers.

For the first time he felt, in his few hundred years, like his forging as a doctor was a true calling and not some cosmic joke. It was like emerging from the hot spot a second time, his metal hot, sensors alive and ready for anything. His supervisor had recommended him immediately for a trauma assignment.

The offers for employ had rolled in.

Trauma wasn't considered a prestigious field, but highly demanding one — and highly in demand. It'd felt like waking up. Freedom. Things weren't easy when he returned, but he graduated from the Academy in the top five of his class of nearly a hundred, with a bevy of offers from dozens of major and minor institutions, from Iacon to Kaon to Altihex.

First Aid's recharge flux puts him straight into the berth in the little hab he'd rented on credit when he'd taken his first probationary position in Polyhex.

He'd loved that place; as shabby as it'd been, it'd been the first time he'd been without his cohort piled in alongside him in dormitories — or barracks. The building was sixteen units, his slatted window overlooking a busy thoroughfare, the dense, raucous noise of polity life pouring through the thin glass like oil into an empty tank.

At night, colorful light from the halogen signs leaked in through the cracks, painting his berth in a pale, shifting rainbow. In the mornings, his hab had been burnished copper, the faint sunrise bouncing off dozens of windows until the central thoroughfare filled with the glow of electrum-tinged light.

The same hab where he'd felt, a second time, the same painfully bright newness of finding his place the first time he'd ever entertained another mech in his berth. First Aid discovered there was far more than one way to care for the Cybertronian form.

Now — in the sluggish grip of recharge, a warm, soft mouth feathers a kiss up the side of his throat, sending crackles of pleasure down sensors that haven't been touched in centuries. Memory merges strangely with the present. He turns into the touch, reaching back to cup an unfamiliar face, his plating slack and his entire frame filled with a pleasant ache of building charge.

Half of him, rousing from recharge, remembers the Acid Rain and Vortex; the other half, still in the reluctantly lifting haze of the flux, wonders who the stranger in his berth could possibly be.

First Aid jolts fully aware at the hand that dips below his waist, long fingers tipped with claws stroking a line of pure fire down his abdominal plating and towards his array cover.

He scrambles out of Vortex's grip, half dragging himself across a floor that's decidedly not a berth, and only stops when his back is up against a storage cabinet.

Vortex pushes himself upright, watching First Aid with bright, fixed interest.

"What's the matter?" Vortex asks, his voice a low, soft buzz, static-laced. Aware and moving, he's far more animated than First Aid expects, his optics darting up and down First Aid's frame, mouth expressive. "I won't bite unless you ask, sweetspark."

There's a flash of fang, wicked, mischievous. First Aid's own lines are swollen with unconsciously generated charge, a hot shock of arousal coursing through him, a thunderclap that leaves an ache behind. He can still feel Vortex's hand on him, descending, a sensor ghost. His imagination fills in the intended path all too well.

A small, terrible, very specific part of him contracts in blatant interest. He presses his thighs firmly together.

First Aid opens his mouth. "I'm not —"

"Wet and ready for a good spiking?" The words come out as a purr. Vortex moves fluidly, crouching, and advances a meter at a time until he's just out of range of First Aid kicking him. "Doesn't look that way from where I am."

He looks pointedly down at First Aid's legs. First Aid only barely resists the urge to cover himself. There's no actual way for Vortex to tell, despite the trembling feeling coursing through his circuitry. He has a traitorous thought it would be shockingly easy, in fact, to simply allow it to happen.

First Aid pushes the thought away with some effort and falls back on his medical protocols in its place, stifling the feeling beneath checklists and data collection. He pointedly ignores Vortex's flirting. "How are you feeling? Any pain?"

Vortex slinks forward another meter, squatting between First Aid's outstretched shins. He angles his blades upwards, fanning them out over his shoulders. They twitch in interest. First Aid tries not to let it get to him — he marks it down in Vortex's patient file as a sign of his spark integrating. Charge generation is a positive marker for processor-spark connectivity; First Aid only wishes his own vitals were slightly less responsive.

"Don't usually get fluxes with tasty little doctors in them," Vortex says, planting a hand on First Aid's thigh. "This is a treat."

The realization connects: Vortex apparently doesn't know he's not in recharge — or worse, even out of spark containment. That's not a great sign.

It's grounding. First Aid leans forward and takes Vortex's chin firmly in his hand, tipping Vortex's face up so he can peer into Vortex's optics. They're focused, sharp, intent. He should be fully aware. "This isn't a flux."

"What?" Vortex asks, the word half laughter, a chuffing sound of disbelief that expels hot air out of his vents. "Pull the other one. Come here. You're delicious."

He gets a hold on First Aid's collar and surges forward, pressing their frames together. Vortex's mouth grazes his bare jaw. Heat roils through First Aid, not entirely unexpected, but intense. First Aid rolls his optics up to the ceiling, half in beseechment for his own frame not betraying his sense of professionalism, half in flat exasperation, and pushes Vortex gently but firmly away.

Even if it wasn't a completely absurd idea to frag a mech he's only just met on a derelict prison ship, it'd be deeply unethical to do it without Vortex being fully cognizant of reality. Primus help him. He's had difficult patients before, but none of them have tried to get him to frag them on the filthy deck of an abandoned ship.

Vortex freezes, then withdraws with barely a whisper of metal. Soft and low, he asks, "Do you hear that?"

All at once, Vortex is upright, standing over First Aid, blades flared aggressively along his back, claws flexing like he's fully prepared to fling himself violently at the next thing that moves. First Aid is uncomfortably reminded Vortex is a living weapon; for a split second he looks exactly the part, every atom of him ready to do violence.

None of it is aimed towards First Aid, but his plating still prickles uneasily. The scratching, itchy feeling of being watched rises back to the forefront of his processes, the paranoia fed by Vortex's behavior. He's got to get a grip on himself.

He suppresses his ventilations and listens. There's a strange, rhythmic scraping, a dull sound like a large fan turning. Pipes gurgling, the slow dripping decay of an innumerable amount of metal tubes. Beyond that, nothing breaks the pattern.

Quietly, First Aid asks, "What does it sound like?"

Vortex standing over him makes it impossible for First Aid to get to his feet, so he lifts a hand and closes his fingers over Vortex's forearm. Vortex doesn't pay much attention to it, but he doesn't shake First Aid off, either.

"Something moving," Vortex says, angling his head from one side to the other. He tips his face upwards, seeking. "Slithering."

Slithering? A shuddery chill touches First Aid. He cuts that train of processing off before the thought can spiral into paranoia. There are strange sounds in old derelicts, the ship itself groaning, shuddering slowly apart over eons of disrepair. The entire structure is slowly falling apart. It doesn't mean they're being watched.

There's a sudden, cascading burst of radio frequencies. First Aid sits up as far as he can manage, interest piqued. Vortex has some sort of radar capabilities — not uncommon on most aerial frames, but rarely used outside of alt mode. "Anything?"

"Can't tell," Vortex says, then shakes his head vigorously, as if to clear it. "Bad flux. Weird slag."

"You're not having a flux," First Aid repeats, reaching for Vortex's hands. Vortex lets him take them, unresisting, his palms cool and smooth against First Aid's, his expression oddly blank. "I woke you up from spark containment. Can I take your vitals?"

First Aid gives him a firm but insistent tug, coaxing him back down.

Vortex crouches in front of him and makes no special effort to cooperate with First Aid, but he doesn't fight either. His optics skate almost blankly over First Aid, a dullness to them that doesn't necessarily bode well. It isn't entirely clear whether he's having some sort of hallucinatory episode. The link between spark and processor can behave strangely even with a fresh implantation.

Very slowly, so he doesn't startle Vortex, he rubs his thumb over the closed access panel in Vortex's forearm, initiating a medical query as he comes in contact with the sensors there. It takes three passes for Vortex to open for him, but he draws out a length of cabling from Vortex's forearm and plugs it into his diagnostic port.

First Aid's HUD explodes with a wealth of information the nanosecond the handshake protocols are complete; Vortex doesn't even scan his credentials, just grants him unfettered deep systems access.

He recoils slightly before letting himself spool out inside the defined boundaries of medical data, but it's like standing in a massive storage room and not taking a step outside of a painted square around him; he can't help but see beyond.

First Aid rummages around as gently as he can manage. He makes a concentrated effort to avoid touching anything deeper than frame specs and vitals. He gets little flashes of emotional bleed through all the same, Vortex's control of the connection so poor as to be nonexistent. What he does get is nothing but muffled confusion with undertones of exhaustion.

"I'm awake. You're a real doctor?" Vortex asks, looking down as if he's finally noticed First Aid is real. A needle-sharp spike of interest darts through the interface before First Aid closes his side of the connection more tightly. "I don't usually get good doctors in fluxes."

The implication being he gets bad doctors in fluxes, which worries First Aid more than the rest of it combined. First Aid tries to be reassuring, "You're awake and I'm a real doctor. If you hold still for a minute, I'm going to take care of you."

He doesn't get a response; the vaguely dreamy expression settles over Vortex's features.

Except Vortex's vitals are all relatively normal, almost frustratingly so. The metal deficiencies will take a while to fix, but there are no obvious hardware failures. His processing responses are normal — agile, without so much as a hint of latency, faster than First Aid's own in lightning-quick aerial frame fashion.

From the power fluctuations, he's having some minor connectivity issues between his sensory suite, his spark, and his processor. They're all within safe parameters for cold cons. It isn't an indicator for hallucinatory episodes. His firmware is about four million years out of date, but First Aid will have to fix it later, layer by layer.

First Aid touches Vortex's face again, pressing a thumb against each of his cheeks to test tactile reactivity. He pushes Vortex's lips back from his teeth and coaxes his jaw open, inspecting his oral sensors for any blackening that might indicate some sort of circuitry damage. Vortex only blinks at him, allowing it without protest.

Nothing. On a hunch, First Aid loosens his emotional filter over the medical interface, allowing his concern to trickle through.

Vortex's optics focus, the inner apertures dilating so rapidly the glow swallows the bank sensors behind it. He pulls his head out of First Aid's grip and shakes it vigorously, but his entire processing suite leaps to attention.

"You're real?" Vortex asks doubtfully, coming back to himself. He reaches out and touches First Aid tentatively, as if to be certain. His claws tap out a pattern on First Aid's chest plating.

"I'm real," First Aid says. "Your readouts look strong. Are you still hearing things?"

"Nah," Vortex says dismissively, optics fixed on First Aid's mouth. "You're sure you aren't a flux?" He skims a darting hand over First Aid's thigh plating. "These are definitely a pair of legs right out of a frag fantasy."

It's like the episode didn't even happen — he's right back to flirting.

There's a distinct blast of mischief from Vortex's end of the connection that prompts an involuntary blat of static from First Aid. He elbows Vortex's hand away and snaps the cable out of the diagnostic port, clearing his vocal synthesizer. "I'm certain I'm real."

"Lucky me," Vortex says with a flash of a smirk. He stands quickly and looks around the room, optics lingering on the empty spark canister he was housed in. He holds the extended data cable, rolling it between his fingers with a glance back at First Aid before retracting it with a snap. "This place is kind of a slag heap, even for a prison ship. Where's everyone else?"

First Aid hesitates to admit they're alone together, but it isn't like he couldn't overpower Vortex if he needed to. He splits the difference on the truth and tries not to feel guilty about it, "There was an emergency. None of the other prisoners survived. The spark canisters were all blown."

"Slag luck for them, I guess." Vortex tilts his head, his optics pointedly skating down First Aid's frame. He doesn't seem particularly concerned. "Can't say I mind having the current company all to myself."

Vortex offers him a hand up. First Aid takes it and gets hoisted to his feet almost effortlessly. Vortex's claws skate up his forearm to cup his elbow.

"Thanks," First Aid says, belatedly, trying to ignore the flush of heat the overly familiar touch prompts. A little internally-directed irritation follows. He shouldn't let Vortex provoke him. "Can you describe how you're feeling?"

First Aid politely removes Vortex's hand, putting some space between them.

"Pretty slag. Like I've got the worst overcharge backlash of my life," Vortex says, scratching idly at his own abdominal plating. He looks down, opening and closing his claws as if noticing them the first time. "At least you slaggers got the frame right this time."

"Just some good luck," First Aid says. "If you'd made it to your destination, they probably would've confiscated it and given it to someone else."

First Aid still remembers the reports from the Decepticon liberation of the spark containment facilities and prison camps. Thousands of mechs had been dumped back into frames that didn't belong to them. Megatron did what he could with what he had — and if any credit could be given to Megatron in those days, First Aid isn't sure the Autobots could've done any better once the construction facilities had already been bombed out. The Senate had a storied history of body snatching from mechs they considered undesirables.

There were chains of extinguished sparks. More failures than successes. Qualified medical professionals — doctors, experienced nursing staff, even a good blacksmith — might have quelled the bulk of it, but mechs with the knowledge and skill to help rarely joined the ranks of an organization the Senate had already branded as terrorists.

The Decepticons ran on stolen tech, triage medics, and chop shop mechanics for centuries before Megatron managed to get a proper medical staff up and running. They'd still never quite caught up.

Vortex is looking up at the ceiling, into the darkness above and behind First Aid. His plating contracts uncomfortably, a flare of sensation passing across his shoulders, like he's being watched.

"Do you see something?"

"No," Vortex says absently. First Aid thinks maybe he's slipping back into whatever foggy, confused state he's just come out of, but then Vortex looks at him with clear, bright optics, and asks, "You can't hear that? The engine's not powered. How fragging long have I been out?"

*

First Aid comes clean about the circumstances of Vortex's recovery and about Cybertron.

It takes some time, Vortex silent throughout, optics fixed on First Aid's face and head tilted in a considering way. First Aid eventually finds the weight of Vortex's scrutiny too much and looks away, speaking almost mechanically. His hands find a task to do, hooking Vortex up to monitoring equipment, which Vortex allows without protest.

He leaves out Delphi, the Lost Light, glosses over Earth and so many other meaningless, pointless, exhausting things. Some parts of the war are still too tender, some parts too unfamiliar, some too crushingly boring. He doesn't talk about the long centuries of nothing in between, where he spent more time pulling dents than putting mechs back together. First Aid paints a picture of a destroyed home with broad strokes, keeping his voice low and private, and Vortex leans forward to listen.

Cybertron is mostly a wasteland. Any cities not reduced to rubble by the early ground war or later orbital bombings were slagged in the planetary reformat. Iacon, Polyhex, and Vos are rebuilding, resources stretched across the planet as thinly as a layer of morning ice.

He falls silent, a knot of trepidation in his chassis. Vortex says nothing at all and it's only after the moment drags on, protracted, that First Aid hazards a look at him.

Vortex is staring steadily down at the cable sprouting from his forearm. The expression on his face is impossible to read, a carefully schooled neutrality.

"Right," First Aid says, when Vortex persists in his contemplation, withdrawing a few steps. "I'll let you — I'll give you a moment to process."

He leaves Vortex attached to the monitor, cognitive monitoring running, while he pulls the rest of the prisoner files. First Aid finds he can't manage to continue reading through them after the third, a feeling of dull, monumental grief threatening at the edges of his processor, but he saves them all to storage one by one, carefully labeling them for later perusal.

Maybe someone still alive on Cybertron might want to know how these mechs died. At the very least, they can be added to the archives as part of one of the war memorial projects.

Movement catches his optic, completely shaking him out of his bleak mood.

First Aid watches Vortex from his peripheral vision as he pulls his knee up near his face and peers into a gap in the plating. He sticks a claw into it, wiggling it around to some unknown effect. First Aid slowly puts down the data pad he's holding, giving up any pretense of doing anything except watching Vortex.

Evidently his data reconciliation had no problem in integrating a massive worldview challenge. First Aid stares.

Curiosity changes abruptly into alarm when Vortex fishes a flat metal probe out of the corroding detritus and sticks it directly into the joint with a determined expression.

First Aid staggers forward with a distressed beep and plucks it right out of Vortex's hand. "Do you want a rust infection?"

"Give that back," Vortex says, snatching at it. He misses, but grazes First Aid's arm and latches on, claws digging into a gap in First Aid's plating. "I was using that."

First Aid flings the probe back into the pile of jung and plants his hand in the center of Vortex's chest, keeping him from escaping. "What's the problem here — pain? Itching? Is there any burning?"

"Why do you give a slag?" Vortex bristles. His grip tightens, a sudden, petulant downward tilt to his mouth.

First Aid is never gifted with agreeable patients. Ever. He pushes Vortex gently out of his personal space and hoists the offending knee to test the range of motion. He repeats patiently, "Pain, itching, or burning?"

Vortex gives him a sidelong look. "All three? Doesn't matter." He's wary of medics, maybe. First Aid adjusts his grip to a less restrictive hold and feels along the underside of Vortex's knee, lifting. There's a slight shift in the actuator that shouldn't be there, fractions of a centimeter.

"It does," First Aid says firmly, glad to be back on familiar ground. "If there's a misalignment in the joint and you crush it, I'll need to replace the whole thing."

Vortex's death grip on First Aid's arm subsides, but he keeps his hand there. First Aid lets him, but turns a little so he can brace Vortex's ankle over the jut of his hip, Vortex's knee pressed carefully against First Aid's chest plating. The position is neither comfortable nor practical, but if this is what Vortex is giving him to work with, it'll have to do.

With both hands, First Aid carefully feels around the paneling until he finds the almost imperceptible maintenance access notches. He presses on them with exactly enough pressure the catch releases with a click and Vortex's knee joint transforms open to reveal the interior mechanics.

It looks superficially fine, but long term cryostasis sometimes does weird things to delicate mechanical parts. Vortex leans over to peer inside alongside him when First Aid pulls out a long — and clean — medical probe and uses it to carefully lift up the protective housing on the actuator.

Pain, itching, burning. All of the above, right in front of him. The insulation on the wiring is cracked and brittle, overstimulating the sensor and allowing the actuator to overextend. There must have been some sort of fluid intrusion into the joint, or an old injury never repaired before his systems were suspended and Vortex's spark removed.

"Does anywhere else feel like this?" First Aid asks, digging around in a subspace compartment. He has wire strippers and shrink tubing that'll do the trick. He even turns up a replacement connector with the correct socket configuration.

"Not yet," Vortex says. His grip on First Aid moves higher, tips of his claws curling beneath First Aid's upper arm. It tickles, but First Aid ignores it.

"Try to hold still. I'm going to unplug the sensory cabling in your leg so it doesn't hurt. It'll feel like you can't move it," First Aid explains. He reaches in and plucks the cabling out of the socket when there's no protest forthcoming. He has to catch Vortex's leg and prop it back up with his forearm as it goes limp.

"You're really a doctor?" Vortex asks again. There's a faint look of confusion that flits across his expression. First Aid glances at the readouts on the holoscreen. There's a flicker, a tiny power surge, but there's nothing indicating Vortex is having another hallucination. It could easily be the equipment malfunctioning. "A real one?"

"I can show you my credentials if you want," First Aid says as he flips the wire strippers around and makes quick work of peeling the insulating layer and damaged connector off. He glances up at Vortex and offers him a friendly smile. "I'm fully licensed." A pause. The Autobots didn't bother to keep up the pretense outside of occasional spotty recertifications. "Was fully licensed. I suppose no one's bothered issuing real licences for about four million years."

A buzz of conductive feedback jolts through the sensors on the tips of his fingers, tiny pops of static and strange, disjointed data packets amounting to nothing except sensory noise. He tastes metal on the back of his tongue and his shoulder plating twitches not-quite-pleasantly. He works the tubing over the bare wire in one smooth motion and installs the new connector with an efficient twist, crimping the end down to secure it.

He drops the wire strippers onto the workbench and encourages the cable back into its slot in Vortex's actuator, snapping the cover back down over it and rubbing it a few times with his thumbs to jump start sensory calibration. Vortex's entire leg spasms as it powers up and First Aid is suddenly and vividly aware Vortex is staring at him.

He tilts his head up, making optical contact with Vortex, and is glad for his visor still hiding his expression, even if his filtration mask is still retracted. Vortex's face is extremely close to his, their heads bowed together, Vortex's legs braced against First Aid. His touch curls into the sensitive edge of First Aid's elbow joint, cupping the metal, an echo of his previous touch.

First Aid has some trouble looking away from Vortex's face; his optics are hooded and dim, a smoldering slag red, his sparse biolights flickering with open interest.

Vortex sprouts a lopsided grin, a hint of fang accompanying a flirtatious tilt of his blades, and First Aid jolts back slightly at the answering flush of interest running through his own lines.

"So," Vortex says, a playful tremolo in his voice, "you said Cybertron is slagged. Must be a whole lot of messed up fraggers living in the muck. You wake me up because I was so pretty?"

The flustered feeling only gets worse when Vortex slides pointedly off the workbench and into First Aid's personal space. He catches First Aid around the waist to keep him from retreating.

"What?" First Aid says stupidly, then realizes he's being teased. "Were you even listening?"

"Checked out around the halfway point when you said there weren't any buildings left," Vortex admits, grinning. He reaches up and thumbs over First Aid's bare cheek. "You keep that mask of yours on so you don't distract patients?"

First Aid is suddenly, painfully aware of their proximity, only a few centimeters of air separating them, the gap made even more palpable by how minuscule it is. Vortex angles his head and exvents warm air over First Aid's face and neck.

First Aid clamps down on his actuators to keep his plating from shifting open in reciprocal invitation. It's been a while since he's had any kind of attention, but he didn't think he was desperate.

"Is the repair holding?" he asks, wrestling his voice back into a metered, professional tone.

"Leg doesn't hurt anymore," Vortex says, his voice layered with a deeply pleasant radio burst that fizzles over First Aid's audial sensors. He's being scanned. It skates across his plating, palpable at this range. Unbelievable. He's relentless. "You're good with your hands."

"Let me know," First Aid says, lifting Vortex's claws out of his elbow and holding Vortex there by the wrist, letting Vortex feel the strength in his grip, "if anything else starts bothering you."

Vortex's grin widens, sharpening. Unfortunately, he is attractive. Almost pristine, and with an architecture First Aid could all too easily imagine running his hands over. It's a lot like a laser scalpel on a fuel line, cutting cleanly through First Aid's composure. "Yeah, I'll let you know."

First Aid releases him and turns away smartly, picking the data pad up before he does something extremely stupid and vaguely unethical, like grab Vortex and — kiss him, bite him, sink his fingers somewhere soft and hot. If he thinks about it too hard he can still feel the sticky, staticky feeling of Vortex's spark cupped between his palms and a strange feeling jolts up his spinal strut.

Absurd. First Aid shakes off the shivery feeling, untangling his messy, inappropriate emotional reaction from his conscious level processing and coaxing it back down into the background. He's not some freshly sparked newbuild getting his first dose of attention.

First Aid should know better. Maybe it's just because he can still feel the echo of Vortex's spark crackling between his palms. He's a little mixed up.

It's been a long time since anyone's expressed more than a passing interest in him, but Vortex is his patient. Technically. Temporarily. He should cut the line of thinking entirely. Bury it.

"Where was this junk heap headed, anyway?" Vortex asks, mercifully changing the subject.

First Aid calls up the record. "Manifest says the destination was the Cobalt Theta penal colony."

Vortex peers over First Aid's arm. "You sure about that?"

First Aid lowers the data pad. "Why do you ask?"

"Because my targeting systems are still active," Vortex says, drumming his claws on the metal table. First Aid watches him move, his joints articulating smoothly, and tries not to think about the way it felt to reach into his open chassis. "Cobalt Theta was a mining world. Trithyllium. They don't ship military spec cold cons out there and even if they did, they don't let you keep your weapons. Maybe there was a second stop."

"Even if it was entered into the navigation, I wouldn't be able to access the second destination without cracking security," First Aid says. "Any of the crew we could've asked is long gone."

"Too bad. I would've liked to have had a go at a few of the slaggers that roughed me up before I got yanked." Vortex gives First Aid a narrow look, suspicious. "You really here all alone? On a death trap like this?"

He never said he was alone, only the other prisoners didn't make it. First Aid tenses. "Why do you say I'm alone?"

"You boarded without any backup." Vortex cocks his head. "Reckless of a doctor."

First Aid remembers the psych profiling notes perhaps a little too late to do anything but edge around the truth. "I've done this kind of thing before."

"Not alone," Vortex says, puncturing the seal on the energon cube. He licks his claw clean and then downs the whole thing in a single go, mouth shiny when he lowers the empty container. "There's something wrong with you."

"There's nothing wrong with me," First Aid says, but it sounds like a lie, and a blatant one. It would've been sensible to call for assistance, to board with an entire search and rescue crew.

"You won't do it again," Vortex says, head angled down, optics fixed on First Aid. His tone makes it sound like an order.

First Aid makes a soft, perplexed sound, a query glyph, confused. He doesn't push back; he doesn't immediately know how to solve for Vortex behaving like First Aid is someone he can order around.

Vortex takes a step towards him, drawing his claws over the surface of the exam table, a hissing scrape of metal on metal. There's nowhere for him to retreat, so First Aid asks, "Are you thinking of trying something?"

"Do you want me to?" Vortex asks, his voice pitched low, soft. "You look like you're waiting for it."

First Aid opens his mouth and asks, "Do I?" so quietly he doesn't recognize his own voice. He tilts his head up. Vortex isn't that much taller than him, their frames roughly the same size. Unbidden, he thinks their form factors would be a good match, aligning nicely, similar power generation.

A loud crash jolts them both apart. First Aid hisses atmosphere, blowing steam in the frigid air, fuel pump leaping. The silence that follows is almost deafening.

Stupid. He's not sure why he's so distracted. He shakes his head and gathers himself. When he looks, Vortex's plating is cinched down, his blades flared aggressively. Claws spread, he turns with claws spread towards the source of the sound. "Thought you said we were the only ones here?"

"I said I hadn't found anyone else," First Aid says.

Vortex is still connected to the monitors. The readouts hold a strong, steady green — combat ready and not a single flicker of systems strain — then abruptly flatline when Vortex reaches up and pulls the data cable out of his medical port. He glances at First Aid sharply. "But we are the only ones here?"

First Aid unholsters his blaster, keeping it pointed at the deck, and Vortex falls in behind him. They exit through the spark containment storage room. First Aid keeps his optics fixed forward, ignoring the empty canisters. He can hear Vortex's footsteps slow, as if taking in the carnage, and then speed up. The lantern is still lit as they pass it, the battery going strong, so he scoops it up and brings it with them.

"Give me a hand with this," First Aid says, gripping one side of the jammed door.

Vortex moves opposite and braces himself. First Aid nods and they both give an enormous tug, sliding the door open far enough to see outside without cramming themselves through it.

The exterior corridor is dimly lit but clear. First Aid lifts the lantern cautiously, ready to take point, but Vortex takes it out of his hand and steps in front of him. First Aid cedes to Vortex, peering after him as he investigates.

It's only a fallen maintenance access panel laying on end. Just out of easy reach, the lower edge of an extendable ladder disappears up into the darkness. Vortex approaches and kicks it the rest of the way over with his foot, the concussive sound like a weapon being discharged in the empty corridor. His blades twitch up a few notches, frame language no less tense.

First Aid emerges from the doorway to inspect it. The bolts look rusted through, recently sheared off. A tight knot of apprehension lodges itself in his fuel intake. He swallows. It doesn't make any sense the panel would be disturbed by someone else on the ship and find no evidence of access to the maintenance corridors. "This place is falling apart."

"So," Vortex ventures, straightening but keeping his optics fixed on the ventilation duct, "when do we get off this hunk of rusting scrap?"

First Aid looks into the storage facility, thinking about the rows of cryopods, inanimate frames empty of sparks, then back to Vortex. "Not yet. I have more work to do."

*

First Aid remembers the first time he desperately peeled a part off a dead mech and put it on a dying mech only meters away, wallowing in mud and spilled oil on an alien planet. The smell of slag had been so strong he'd been able to taste it. When he'd been alone, much later, he'd felt the horrible shock of realizing that, unless the tide turned, he'd have to defile the dead to save the living.

The tide never turned. Pitched combat had sent their forces from world to world, begging, borrowing, and occasionally even stealing to keep ahead of Megatron. Now, the dead outnumber the living and First Aid long ago came around to a much more practical view on the situation.

The frame storage facility is relatively untouched by time. The air is damp with humidity, but the signs of slow decay plaguing the rest of the ship are sparse here. Someone, at some point, spent a great number of creds to construct this facility.

The lights above flicker occasionally, but still function. Each one of the cryopods itself is relatively quiet, but taken in together they produce a deep machine hum so deep it muffles their footsteps on the metal deck.

First Aid won't be able to recover everything his patients need, but with nearly a thousand unsparked mechs on ice, there's a wealth of parts nearly impossible to source and even harder to fabricate.

First Aid finds the first thing he's looking for in the fifth cryopod he checks: a big frame with a tank alt mode, a dark, burnt orange color. He has a patient that's been waiting nearly two years for a specialty fuel pump. This one is only a year off of the original manufacture date, the form factor identical, and the connectors the same. A simple alteration to the manifold will make it fit.

He flags the frame for salvage, starts the thaw process, and moves further down the line consulting the list of his current pending cases.

Once he sorts through the high priority repairs he can evaluate some of the rarer components. Even a dozen pairs of undamaged optics might get some of the construction back on track; there are at least that many laborers in Iacon on secondary sensory components alone.

Vortex trails behind him, dividing his time between trying to look over First Aid's shoulder and peering into the cryostasis tubes. "What are you doing?"

"Salvage," First Aid says absently, making another note on his data pad. "There are a lot of mechs back on Cybertron in need of replacements that are almost impossible to source."

Vortex tilts his head in First Aid's direction. "I thought you said you were a doctor. They let you run chop shops on Cybertron these days?"

"Not much choice," First Aid says, entering a few serial numbers and mapping out an efficient route for collection. The question might have been offensive to him a few million years ago. "The war took down all the factories. Interstellar trade is expensive and the parts we get shipped in aren't always serviceable quality. Most mechs have to take recycled or they don't take them at all."

"This Megatron slagger really fragged things up, huh," Vortex says. First Aid looks up in surprise, but Vortex continues tapping his claws over the surface of the cryopod holding a mech with some sort of heavy duty construction alt mode.

Sometimes First Aid forgets how omnipresent Megatron was in the political sphere before he went full conquering warlord. He has a bit of a different perspective of Megatron these days, but there's a sort of bleakness to the years of the war that still taints everything after it.

"You have no idea," First Aid says. "We're rebuilding as best we can. There's even a spaceport up and running again." First Aid glances at him to see Vortex peering down the aisle, blades flexed open. "You're taking this all pretty well."

Vortex shrugs. "Don't matter to me. Was just some lowlife guttermech to them anyway, right? Bright side, I figure, is that all the slaggers I owed creds to are dead."

"Probably," First Aid says, watching Vortex's claws make streaks in the condensation collecting on a cryopod as they pass. It didn't quite occur to him, in the absence of the war, that waking up to news of a Cybertron changed might not be distressing to a mech who had almost nothing before it was swallowed up.

The conversational topic exhausted, First Aid turns his thoughts back to his work. Vortex isn't showing any visible signs of distress, so First Aid smears an unusually heavy layer of condensation away from the next cryopod. He frowns as he peers inside.

Rust. He feels along the side and finds a breach in the seal, painfully cold air seeping from a needle-sized puncture. The frame inside is sagging in the restraints, jaw hinged open too wide, optics clouded with humidity from extended moisture breach. He marks it as a total loss and moves on to the next.

There are half a dozen more unsalvageable frames in the next row, victim of some sort of equipment failure; all six pods are on the same fried circuit. The monitoring lights are off and the exhaust vents are steadily dripping oxidized liquid. He doesn't bother checking inside. It's unlikely there's anything left but a fragile shell of sentio metallico.

"Come here," he says to Vortex at the next keypad, holding his hand out illustratively. Vortex comes closer, in his space, and peers over First Aid's outstretched arm. "This will go faster if you help. This button here brings up the medical access —" he demonstrates "— and this code will override the safety locks." Vortex's ventilations skate down his side. "And then it's this sequence to complete it. You try."

"Did you wake me up to help you carry things?" The sideways look he gives First Aid is sly, but he punches in the key combination without hesitating. First Aid notes Vortex's apparent good memory recall down in his file. "Are you going to keep me on a chain in your clinic and have me hand you tools?"

"Primus," First Aid mutters, but then chuffs a laugh, once, before lowering his data pad. "I woke you up because it was the right thing to do."

"No chains, then?" Vortex asks, a wistful note to his voice. "What if I asked very nicely?"

"Don't be ridiculous." First Aid's hand slips on the keypad of the next pod but he recovers. Absurd laughter threatens and he crushes it back down. Ridiculous. "You're distracting me. I have work to do."

Maybe admitting it is a mistake, because Vortex makes an amused clicking noise. He hovers closer, until First Aid can feel the warmth of his exhaust in the chill air. "You ain't got somebody waiting for you back home?"

Discomfort clenches in First Aid's chassis at the mention of Cybertron. The last time he'd gone hunting for anything — a friend, a lover, a conversation — he'd gotten most of the way to Maccadam's and stood down the street looking at the bright signage above the entrance with a rising panic.

He's starting to feel a lot like that right now. Confronting his own long isolation is more like staring down into the open maw of an active smelter.

"Am I really what you want to talk about? Not —" First Aid gestures broadly around them, at the Acid Rain and more generally the universe, and can't keep the tremor out of his vocal synthesizer "— the last four million years you've missed?"

"Sure," Vortex says, twitching his blades up and down, a gesture as good as a shrug in conveying his disinterest in current events. "What can I do about all that other slag?"

"I thought you'd want to know what you're going back to," First Aid says, trying to steer the conversation elsewhere.

"Hmm." Vortex leans in, blades fanned out attractively. "Maybe you can help me. I've got a question I've been dying to get an answer to."

First Aid's lines heat in a wave from his chassis down his limbs. His lips part. "What?"

"What was it like to hold my spark?" Vortex asks, voice pitched low. "Did you drop me in right away or did you take your time?"

Another time, in a different place, First Aid might take it as Vortex means it — playful, flirtatious, the kind of attention First Aid craves — but it lands badly, hard, like a blow. The plating contracts up First Aid's chassis, betraying his reaction to the accusation, even though it's delivered so sweetly in Vortex's sibilant voice.

He shakes his head in denial, but even as he says, "That's not how it happened," he has a vivid memory dump of the way Vortex felt cupped in his palms. "Are you trying to provoke me?"

"Provoke you? I'm grateful." Soft laughter, mischief. The hand on his hip, claws curling into his joint, the hot ventilation behind him — except it's too much, too fast. There's warmth in Vortex's voice when he says, "Did I strike a loose wire? Did you enjoy fondling my spark?" but First Aid barely registers it.

Everything tilts for First Aid. A thin lance of trepidation that threatens to turn into panic shoots up his spinal strut. First Aid turns in the loose grip and reaches up, seizing Vortex's collar to tug him closer, his fuel pump surging at the proximity, fear and heat a confusing mixture. Vortex's optics flick down to First Aid's mouth, the red glow burning bright.

He thinks about kissing Vortex. He thinks about shooting him. He thinks about throwing him down on the deck right there, climbing atop him, and —

Vortex makes the mistake of moving too quickly and First Aid's tactical handler makes the decision for him. A weapon is in First Aid's hand before he allows his speculation module to spin up further fantasies.

It's almost comical to watch Vortex's optics widen in surprise when First Aid pushes the nose of a blaster hard against Vortex's abdominal plating. First Aid says, "You don't touch me again without express permission. Am I clear?"

There's a strange static in Vortex's voice when he answers, "Yes."

"Bay 13," First Aid says, releasing him. He gives an encouraging wave in the right direction with the business end of the blaster. "Pod 3. If you could be so helpful as to grab the frame there for me, I can get back to work."

He doesn't expect the threat to actually work, but Vortex takes one appraising look at him, then the blaster, and does exactly what he's told.

First Aid holsters it and shakes his hand out, opening and closing it. His entire frame is tingling. Pulling a weapon was maybe a touch too far. He's far too jumpy, that much is apparent. Vortex has no frame of reference for how easily First Aid is backed into a corner.

Control. It's been difficult for him to relinquish, even more difficult for him to maintain. Every time a situation starts to wobble one way or the other, too fast, too much, or on the wrong trajectory, the old fear rises up and grips him again. He's long past due speaking about it — except there's hardly anyone who could help him, even back on Cybertron.

Logically, he's aware he's suffered a terrible trauma. All of them have, even Vortex. Maybe especially Vortex.

First Aid frowns down the empty aisle after him. Maybe —

No. He's right to draw a line. If he's a bit heavy-handed, no one can blame him. Involving himself with a strange mech in a dangerous place is nothing short of foolish, the kind of thing that raises red flags about his self-preservation protocols. Maybe he can speak with Vortex once they're back on the shuttle, explain himself. Do some deeper diagnostics, figure out if he can discharge Vortex from his care.

He looks fixedly down at his notes, trying to banish the feeling of Vortex's hand sliding up his side. Stupid. He shakes his head and tries to clear the processing threads but there are too many of them, ignored for too long. Vortex isn't there to see him struggling, so he allows them to rise and it's tidal, momentous.

It's been so long since he's felt even the slightest prickle of desire that the feeling is overwhelming. First Aid sags forward against the nearest console, letting it swell, pass, and fizzle. He blows out excess heat, steaming the air, his head in both hands, optics offline. This is normal. His frame is functioning normally. He's seen it dozens of times in his clinic. Being unexpectedly fueled and in good repair is a recipe for intense responses.

He's off balance. The rough wake from cryo, the emotional whiplash of all the dead prisoners countered by the sole survivor. His emotional core is in overdrive. Things are muddled, frayed, disorganized. He feels like his chassis has been cracked open, all of him exposed. Vortex looks at him and he feels utterly transparent.

First Aid's baseline has been so deeply in the negative for so long any positive emotion registers along the same frequency as pain.

Right. He's diagnosed his problem and, as usual, there's no time for treatment. He pushes himself upright determinedly and slots his filtration mask back into place. He has work to do. With Vortex helping, it'll go twice as fast.

He calls up his patient files and surfaces the most likely recipients, cross-referencing the architecture of the mech in front of him, but the longer he stands looking into the open chassis, the swifter the feeling of being watched begins to resurface. First Aid lifts his head and peers over his shoulder. He can't hear Vortex's footsteps, even on his most sensitive audial setting. The humming of the cryopods blankets everything out.

First Aid bends back to his work, resolute.

Vortex returns carrying the frame, with a fashionable new addition. He's visor compatible with his attachment points. The heavy acrylic is semi-opaque, a dark red a few shades lighter than his optics. It looks good on his face, like it fits, but it flickers on and off, a visible distortion in the optical output. "Cover was jammed shut. I had to get creative."

First Aid raises both hands, beckoning. "Come here. You're going to burn something out if you don't let me fix the connector."

Vortex places the empty frame on the cleared workspace with more care than First Aid would expect and looks down expectantly at First Aid.

First Aid lifts the visor off Vortex's face and pulls out a needle-thin circuit tester, probing the connection points. The indicator light turns green on each one except the last, so he digs out a miniature fuse from a box of spare components and swaps them out.

"Thanks," Vortex says, when First Aid reaches up and snaps the visor back into place. Slowly, telegraphing his movement, Vortex leans forward and places his hands on the table to either side of First Aid, boxing him in. Vortex isn't touching him at all. "You done being jumpy or do you wanna wave your blaster around at me some more? Gotta say, I'm kinda into it."

First Aid huffs softly. The panic doesn't return, only the molten, liquid feeling low in his chassis. "You're relentless."

"Is it working?" Vortex sounds amused. "Can I touch you now? Promise I'll go real slow."

Yes, First Aid thinks. He swallows and looks away. "I told you, I'm here for my patients."

"So serious," Vortex murmurs, leaning in so the exhaust from his vents gusts across First Aid's shoulder. "Is it my criminal record? I'm rehabilitated, promise."

First Aid strongly doubts that.

"It's common to experience an excess of charge upon reinstatement of your frame," First Aid says matter-of-factly, planting a firm hand in the middle of Vortex's chest plating and pushing him away. He keeps his affect flat, professional. "I'm a doctor, not a charge dump. If you want to handle it privately, I think I saw a grounding cable in the third drawer from the left."

It takes some effort, but he manages not to envision Vortex doing exactly that. Barely. The filtration mask and visor hide his expression, a fact for which he's deeply thankful. He turns away, clamping subtly down on his actuators to stop the twitchy, staticky sensation building in his lines.

"Mm," Vortex says, straightening. "You tell me if you change your mind. You need me to run and fetch you anything else, doc?"

"Not yet," First Aid says, ignoring Vortex's tone and latching gratefully on to the opportunity to return to task. He turns and takes one of the empty frame's arms in his hands and straightens it. "You can watch, if you like."

First Aid rearranges the limbs with as much care as he showed to Vortex's frame. The components harvested from this mech might not be doing their original occupant any good, but they're precious all the same. Whoever they were, they deserve some respect, no matter what they did before they died.

He triggers the transformation sequence to open the chassis Vortex circles around to the other side of the table to peer inside.

"This what I looked like?" Vortex asks, reaching inside to tweak a length of empty fuel tubing with his claw.

"No. You looked like you were in recharge," First Aid says. "Unless you mean internally, then no. Rotary frames have much different sensory routing."

Much prettier, too. First Aid looks down into the open chassis and thinks of holding Vortex's spark in his hands. This time he lets it sit with him. He'll have to let it work its way through his system. It's a miracle Vortex is alive and functioning. An emotional response is natural.

Vortex looks up at him thoughtfully over the open frame. He takes one claw-tipped finger and drags it slowly down the side of a thick rope of sensory cabling. "What about you? Is this what you look like inside?"

First Aid drops his gaze determinedly to the components, but finds it wandering back up to Vortex's face. "Do you always make a habit of trying to frag anything that moves?"

"Nah," Vortex says, grin lopsided. "I only put in effort for the really hot pieces of aft."

Primus. First Aid looks firmly down at his hands. He works several meters of tubing free in a few seconds. At least Vortex's distractions don't impede his ability to work; he could disassemble a mech in recharge. "How many times is it going to take me saying no? I can get them over with now."

Vortex's optics scan slowly up and down First Aid's frame. "More than you've got time for."

He doesn't quite sound chiding when he asks, "Are you always like this?"

"Mm." Vortex withdraws his hand from inside the chassis. "You try being locked away in a jar that long with no one but yourself as company then waking up to a pretty mech pressed up against you. Wouldn't you be motivated to get your spike wet as fast as possible?"

Another blazing rush of charge surges through First Aid, unexpectedly potent. He glances up at Vortex and then quickly averts his optics. "Maybe. I don't know. I'm sorry someone didn't pull you out sooner."

"Not your fault," Vortex says laconically. "Unless you wanna tell me you engineered my arrest, sentencing, and spark extraction. Be a pretty elaborate scheme." There's a significant pause and First Aid can feel Vortex scrutinizing him. "Was it all a ploy to get me alone with you? I'd still be down to frag."

Ridiculous. First Aid blows out atmosphere, unable to contain it any longer, and laughs, the sound louder than he expects. "You're impossible. Are you entirely comprised of conspiracy theories?"

"Slag, was I wrong again?" Vortex clicks thoughtfully, adjusting his rotor blades. He drums his claws on the table, looking openly delighted. "Well, I'm working on a plausible time travel scenario next."

First Aid shoots him an incredulous look, but decides not to throw more fuel on whatever speculative fire Vortex is currently in the process of lighting.

Vortex falls quiet while First Aid works, watching, leaning over, intent. First Aid would have given anything to have any of the medics he trained so fixed on his work.

"I'm asking honestly here." Vortex asks as First Aid begins to unhook the next section of tubing. "What would it take to get you to grope my fuel pump like that? You take creds, or you want me to suck your spike first?"

"Do you always like saying shocking things?" First Aid lifts the fuel pump in question out of the mech. "Put this in the bin, please."

"I like to do shocking things, too," Vortex murmurs, taking the part out of First Aid's hands, practically glittering with mischief. "Let me speed this up. I know my way around a laser scalpel and then some."

"Do you," First Aid says evenly, keeping his voice modulated neutral even though he feels a tight pressure all over his frame. "I think you should go get the next frame and I'll be the judge of that."

*

It takes a few hours to fill up enough containers then haul them back up the elevators and across the circuitous path through the corridors, but it's quicker with an extra pair of hands. Vortex proves to be talented at disassembly, if a bit unscientific; First Aid only has to correct his technique a few times before he catches on.

They don't speak much during the bustle, but the situation between them doesn't improve. First Aid can feel his resolve crumbling under the weight of Vortex's attention, even though Vortex doesn't do much more than watch him. He finds himself slowly dismantling all of his own objections to the idea. It's difficult to be pursued so steadily and not feel like he's being offered fuel on a dry tank.

Vortex doesn't complain about the work. It might be easier to dismiss him as unpleasant company if he did.

Back on the shuttle, First Aid has an excellent view of the situation at hand through the open cargo door when Vortex lifts a crate nearly half his size and slots it into one of the storage bays.

Vortex's frame moves smoothly, fluidly, appealing to watch. First Aid's always had a little bit of a thing for aerial frames. Rotary formats in particular are so compact and efficient, everything lightweight, the internal configurations all so densely organized. He watches the angle of Vortex's flight assembly shift continually, a charmingly animated wobble as it works to balance him through each lift and twist.

First Aid lifts an energon cube and drinks deeply from it, idly picking plastic filaments out of his joints. The feeling of anticipation is back, a cocktail of curiosity and undirected arousal.

Vortex looks up at him midway through storing the last crate and smirks at First Aid like he knows exactly what First Aid is thinking. He secures the cargo tie downs and comes to stand in the open door, leaning against it. His shadow falls long and jagged across the cramped space.

"See anything you like?" Vortex asks, his voice soft.

"You're cold constructed," First Aid says, evading the question. "What were you commissioned for? Do you know?"

"Some sort of special operations unit," Vortex says, a frown creasing his face. "I've got a load of profiling modules. Data extraction. Combat and tactical. Interrogation protocols with a little splash of torture, just for fun." His optics flick down the length of First Aid's frame and then back up, lingering on his legs. "Mech I was supposed to report to was assassinated the day my batch rolled off the assembly line. I wandered out into the street while they tried to figure out what to do with us."

First Aid considers it, thumbing the edge of his empty energon cube. He sets the cube aside, imagining Vortex with a Decepticon brand. First Aid's been held prisoner before. He knows how those things usually go, even for medics. Even that doesn't dampen his interest. "Do you think you would've liked it better?"

"Than spark containment?" Vortex asks. He shrugs one shoulder. "Sure. Or are you asking if I like hurting mechs recreationally?" His optics make another pass over First Aid, slower. "Answer's still yes. Like it the other way, too. That what you want to hear?"

That's not quite what he expected to get out of his question. First Aid's plating shifts open, not disinterested. "Right."

"There are plenty of other ways to make a mech do what you want," Vortex says, his affect casual. The way he says it makes First Aid's entire frame clench in anticipation. "Take you, for example."

"Me?" First Aid is abruptly aware of the berth directly behind him. The moment feels like it stretches out impossibly long. In the safety of his own shuttle, the idea of letting Vortex step across the line between patient and personal seems much less dangerous. "How would you make me do what you want?"

Vortex considers him for a moment, silent, and then sinks to his knees. The sight of him down there is enough to make the flicker of heat flare to a blaze in First Aid's chassis. He's always liked that: a big, dangerous mech making themselves small for him. Putting themselves in his care.

He wonders how Vortex figured it out — if it's a good guess or if First Aid betrayed it when his hand was on his blaster.

"Easy," Vortex says. "I'd give you anything you wanted and you'd give it right back." There's a white hot burning around First Aid's spark. "You wanna tell me what it is?"

First Aid sits down on the berth, right on the edge. He's aware of the closeness of the shuttle, the way the shape of it curves inward and encourages everything together. Vortex watches him with interest, limbs bunched, plating tight. His claw-tipped fingers are hooked into the grating beneath him, a tension and readiness apparent in his limbs.

The feeling settles into certainty. Vortex isn't being coerced, but First Aid's in control of this. He can say no.

He wants to say yes. All he's wanted since he came out of recharge was to pull Vortex down on top of him and put his tongue into that foul, wickedly-smirking mouth.

"Come here," First Aid says softly, holding his hand palm up between his spread thighs. Anticipation flutters around his spark and in his array at the idea of Vortex coming to him on hands and knees like a wild mechanimal. "On your knees. Slowly."

Vortex creeps forward a decimeter at a time, his rotor blades angled upwards and held close to his frame. He comes low and slow, his movement fluid and dangerous, sleek frame gleaming in the dim light from the storage room. He looks as dark as coal smoke in the low lighting, except for his optics, which spill a burning red glow over his upturned face.

He stops with his head even with First Aid's knee, one hand resting on the edge of the berth.

Slowly, so Vortex can move away if he likes, First Aid touches his bare cheek, the metal cool and flexible. Vortex's optics flicker and then go lidded beneath his visor when First Aid cups his chin and strokes along the hard lines of his face. He's beautiful on his knees.

He dips his fingers lower, caressing down the column of Vortex's throat. Vortex leans closer and presses a kiss to the hinge of First Aid's knee. First Aid asks, "Anything I want?"

Vortex's tongue flickers out, snaking into the joint, and First Aid's ventilations stall.

"Anything," Vortex says, with the kind of low intensity that makes First Aid think he actually means anything. Make him kneel. Make him crawl. Open him up and stroke all of his component parts. "Let me thank you."

He pushes First Aid's knees further apart.

First Aid should have a million reasons why this is a terrible idea. It should be easy to stop this — except he suddenly can't seem to think of a single objection, all his old defenses vanished like dust in a storm.

Vortex licks the seam of First Aid's array cover, slow and filthy, and says, "Let me have it," hotly against the metal. "I can smell how much you want it."

First Aid settles back on his elbows, spreading his thighs wider, and allows his panel to open. The cool air hits his damp valve and his hips twitch. Vortex watches as if mesmerized by the slow reveal, his fangs sharp shadows behind the curve of his parted lips. First Aid has a lurid fantasy of Vortex sinking his teeth into soft protometal, biting until First Aid cracks open and all the agony drains out of First Aid.

Instead, Vortex bends and nuzzles along the closed iris of First Aid's spike housing, lipping at the flat rim and dipping his tongue along the seams as they begin to furl open. First Aid allows it to loosen, the rounded tip of his spike already slick when it begins nudging out of the protective inner mesh of his housing. Vortex mouths it with relish as it emerges, sending sparks up First Aid's spinal strut.

It pressurizes slowly into Vortex's waiting mouth, the sensor rings scraping against his fangs. Vortex's jaw slackens as he takes it down to the base, lodging the tip against his fuel intake. First Aid groans, rubbing his hand over the back of Vortex's head, and nearly overloads when Vortex grips the base of his spike and forces the tip into the flexible tubing.

"Careful, slow," First Aid says, but his fingers slip down and tighten on the nape of Vortex's neck. He levers his hips a few centimeters back and forth, grinding gently into the gripping mechanisms as Vortex swallows vainly around him again and again. Sparks pop in his vision, pixelated optical glitches.

Vortex's claws work against the berth on either side of First Aid, kneading and pricking the padding. His tongue explores the underside of First Aid's spike in wet swipes, jaw working, an expression of bliss stealing over him. His rotors flutter, the mechanics angled and spinning so gently they make no sound at all.

First Aid overloads quickly into Vortex's clutching throat, dumping charge-laden transfluid down his fuel intake. Vortex swallows greedily, but the gush of liquid is almost torrential after so long without release; it fills Vortex's mouth and drips messily down First Aid's spike, and when he pulls off his chin is sloppy and slick.

First Aid shudders all over with feeling, waves of it going through him, slow and crashing and tidal. It leaves him dizzy, half-collapsing into the berth.

Vortex licks his fangs and pushes First Aid's thighs up, hitching both of First Aid's legs over his shoulders. "I’m going to eat you alive."

He pushes his face against First Aid's valve and bites at the engorged mesh, hard enough First Aid gasps and squirms. It's almost too much to parse and he falls back flat on the berth, surrendering as Vortex doubles down on his plundering.

First Aid shakes with feeling, haptic clusters he's neglected for millennia firing up in confused, ecstatic paroxysms of pleasure and burning overstimulation. He'd forgotten he could feel so good — his last few overloads had been nothing but hasty fumbling, at a tempo too quick to enjoy — and he basks in the staticky ache as much as the building charge.

Vortex takes him right to the edge a second time, face buried in First Aid's valve, and then abruptly pulls away, panting, face slick with lubricant.

The involuntary whining noise First Aid has been making turns into a grating burst of static, a pained buzzing of unsatisfied charge. He says, "Please," but doesn't know exactly what he's begging for. More, maybe, or a reprieve.

Vortex hoists him further into the berth, sliding him along the smooth surface with a whisper of metal over the padding, and kneels between First Aid's knees. His spike is already out of its housing, a dark node shining bright above the shadowy suggestion of his valve. The light from the corridor glimmers off the slick mess of his own thighs; he's been leaking his own lubricant all over his panels. First Aid groans at the sight of it, reaching for his hips.

"I'm going to enjoy using you as a spikesleeve," Vortex says, a low, accented hiss of glyphs. His spike curves gently upwards, bobbing heavy with hydraulic fluid. Wide sensor ridges ring the engorged mesh, rigid and brutal. "Frag, you look so good. No one's taking care of this hot little hole for you, are they?"

First Aid turns his head to the side and groans. There's no other preparation. Vortex pushes into First Aid's valve, one long, smooth stroke shoving aside clutching, eager calipers. Vortex's weight drives his spike hard against First Aid's ceiling node as his plating flares to exhaust heat and his rotor flutters. First Aid arches up to meet the next grinding thrust with his mouth open, gasping from every vent, the smell of ozone already thick.

They fit together well, the angles of their frames gliding together uninterrupted and unimpeded. Vortex's spike is thick enough to burn at first, and he bends forward to thrust with a slow, battering viciousness that tenderizes First Aid's sensors and leaves him feeling loose and gaping and used.

First Aid slings an arm around Vortex's neck and pulls him down, kissing his messy face open-mouthed and greedy. He feels molten, inside and out, a crystallizing sensation like stepping into his frame for the first time and feeling everything wake at once, an overwhelming glut of sensory input.

The pistoning of Vortex's hips grows unsteady, more of a rolling grind instead of a thrust, like his processor can’t quite keep up with the task of fragging First Aid and kissing him at the same time. His claws scrabble at First Aid’s sides in a way that’s almost desperate, his tongue filling First Aid's mouth, fangs scraping. A crackling grows along Vortex's plating and First Aid chases the sparks with his fingertips, everything going close and humid and burning.

First Aid overloads first, the buildup too untenable to maintain for long, and Vortex tips over seconds after him, flooding First Aid's valve. His tank spirals open eagerly and Vortex's next shaky thrust jams the head of his spike straight into the opening.

He goes rigid and Vortex redoubles his thrusting, dumping gouts of transfluid into his tank with his fangs bared and his optics incandescent with charge. First Aid kicks his legs feebly, his extremities going numb and slack as all the pleasure concentrates first in his chassis and then Vortex’s charge dump spreads outwards in a thunderclap ripple.

Vortex collapses on top of him, panting air all the way down his dorsal vents in great, fogging clouds of steam. First Aid puts both arms around him, hand flat on his spinal strut, and blinks slowly up at the curved bulkhead above them as his vision clears. The position is close enough to the way he woke up holding Vortex after the spark implantation his processor eclipses the two briefly.

They lie together quietly, metal ticking and pinging as they cool, both silent and spent. Gradually, Vortex's ventilations even out, his fans spinning down to a pleasant hum, and he turns his face and nuzzles First Aid's throat with surprising tenderness.

"I spark you up?" Vortex asks against First Aid’s chin, sounding relatively unphased by the prospect.

"Mmmh," First Aid says, feeling sluggish. "What?" He laughs. "Spontaneous spark generation is practically a myth."

His thoughts feel like a warm slurry, pleasant but unwieldy. His peripheral systems flicker online like he’s recovering from a rolling blackout, pinging all clear back to him as they shut down and reboot. Somewhere in the electrical haze, he thinks distantly no one’s ever given him back to back overloads before.

Vortex pulls out of him lazily and flops gracelessly against the berth. His blades get flattened beneath him, but he doesn't seem to mind, stretching expansively. He scratches his abdominal plating, idly scraping off tacky lubricant. "There goes my repopulation theory."

"That's the worst one yet." First Aid snorts abruptly with laughter, a popping fizz of glee going through him at the total absurdity of it. "It can't even happen unless there are critical quantities of sentio metallico available. We'd have to frag on top of an inactive hot spot, for starters."

The spark-generative subroutine doesn't even present itself outside of a very specific set of environmental conditions, none of which are being met. They'd have to be totally isolated for years with a glut of available resources.

First Aid doesn't actually want to succeed, but he can't help but imagine the hot metal smell of Vortex in his arms, trying over and over, dumping load after load of charge.

Vortex smirks and flexes his claws, casting a smug look sideways at him like he knows exactly what First Aid's thinking. "You got a great valve. I was willing to keep trying as long as it takes."

There's an unfamiliar flutter of warmth and First Aid's entire array clenches with anticipation of an implied second round.

"What would I even do if I could make more sparks?" First Aid asks, rolling to face Vortex. He idly taps at the plating over Vortex's spark with the tip of his finger, feeling a kind of warm relief this sort of casual intimacy can still still feel good.

"I have no idea. It was your plan," Vortex says, mouth slanted rakishly in amusement. "Probably take over Cybertron. I was along for the ride."

"At least I know you don't have delusions of grandeur about yourself," First Aid says, fighting back a grin. He’s feeling good and easy for the first time in a while. Now First Aid isn't resisting it, Vortex's company is strangely electric. "I'm not sure how I feel about you trying to preemptively install me as a dictator. We just ended a war."

"Megatron always sounded like a slagger," Vortex says, stretching prodigiously, overextending until his cabling creaks. "I caught a couple of his speeches. All 'we must rise up.' Blah blah blah. Good way to get shot, if you ask me."

First Aid huffs in amusement. If only Vortex knew. Maybe First Aid will catch him up sometime on all the parts he skipped during his history lesson. "Like I'd be any better?"

"You'd be way hotter," Vortex says, scratching his inner thigh idly. It draws attention to the tacky mess of First Aid's lubricant drying on his hips. "Anyway, standing around scaring off the rabble sounds like a better job than the one I had. Could give me a blaster. Make it all official. You could sit on a throne and let me lick your valve."

First Aid rolls upright, swinging a leg over Vortex's waist and settling over his pelvic block. They're both still sticky, but it feels good. Messy and real. "Sorry to disappoint you. I'm only a doctor these days. I have a boring old clinic."

Vortex looks up at him, sliding his claws up and down First Aid's waist with a renewed interest. His optics are fixed on First Aid's face. "You do private appointments?"

"Only if you ask very nicely," First Aid murmurs and lowers his head. "You think you can manage?"

"Mmm," Vortex says, reeling him the rest of the way down. "Slag yeah. I've got a way with my mouth."

Chapter Text

First Aid boots from the best defrag he’s had in centuries, feeling sore and satisfied and pleasantly sluggish. The memory of the remainder of the night twists through him, a hot tangle of limbs, fangs, claws, sharp edges sinking against his frame. Laughter and Vortex's utterly filthy mouth whispering every dirty thing he wanted to do to First Aid.

Then, with a raw delight, letting Vortex do them.

Half-roused, he remembers vividly how it felt to stretch out beneath a heady, consuming attention until the air grew hazy with charge. Being beneath Vortex's tongue is like being devoured from the inside out. First Aid's entire frame is still humming with the aftereffects.

Now, Vortex is resting in the crook of his arm, clawed hand curled over First Aid’s plating. He looks almost sweet in recharge, the shadows on his face softening the keen-edged angularity of his features. An unfamiliar warmth settles in First Aid's chassis. He can't help but feel fond.

First Aid wants to kiss Vortex awake and bring him to overload one last time before their strange bubble of peace is disturbed, but his rest looks too peaceful to interrupt. He skims his fingers over the surface of Vortex's waist. Vortex sighs gustily and tightens his grip on First Aid.

They'll have time on the trip back to Cybertron, he reminds himself.

He's been alone for as long as he can remember. Even during the war, lovers never stuck around for long if they stuck around at all: stations changed, mechs died, years passed. He'd dipped his foot very briefly into the pool of eager-to-please MTOs, hunting for some connection, occasionally almost finding it.

In the end, it'd been too hard to watch a mech leave his berth to go die on some alien battlefield. He'd decided it was better not to get involved at all. And then, after Delphi, after Pharma, and after Ambulon — who hadn't ever been a lover, but had been close enough to First Aid's best friend, who First Aid might have eventually offered amica — First Aid hadn't thought he'd ever find his way back from grief to connect with anyone again.

Vortex recharging beside him, still mostly a stranger, his ventilations slow and breezy, is trouble and a half for First Aid, but he's also a revelation. A realization of some potential First Aid hadn't even allowed himself to consider, not even after the war was over. That someone else might want him for no other reason than First Aid is desirable, that someone else might be ravenous for him.

He shouldn't have given in to the urge, but he can't bring himself to regret it. There's more than one way to be damaged and more than one way to mend it.

Reluctantly, he disentangles himself limb by limb. Vortex curls tightly in on himself, settling in the warm hollow First Aid leaves in the berth. The sight of him there tugs at First Aid's spark. His last remaining reservations melt away as he stands there for far too long, watching the way Vortex's claws twitch in some flux.

Even if this is all they share, two ships passing in the night, First Aid can't bring himself to regret it. Vortex clearly needed it; his vitals are all beautifully green on First Aid's medical monitor, the flickers of frame dissonance almost entirely gone.

First Aid ducks away, careful not to rouse his unlikely berthmate.

The cockpit is dim, full of faint, twinkling lights. The black hull of the Acid Rain still stretches away out of view, a dark and imposing presence. Screens wake silently under his touch and he sifts through the last few hours' worth of scans, thinking almost absently of the way Vortex had looked spread out below him, laid out on display for First Aid.

Even an extremely good frag shouldn't have him so distracted, but there's a fragile, damaged part of himself covered for too long. He's cracked open, raw and sparking. It's like waking from a long sleep. Maybe he and Vortex have more in common than he thought.

He plants his knee on the pilot's chair, leaning over the console, and is reminded vividly of how thorough Vortex had been in showing his continued appreciation of First Aid's mechanics.

One of the alerts gives him pause. First Aid frowns. There's a new notification from less than an hour ago near the engine room, far out of the way of their route through the ship.

He taps through prompts to bring up the details. It's a general warning for a motion-triggered camera activation near the engine maintenance access, but when he flips to the sole working security unit in the exterior corridor and scrubs through the grainy footage he doesn't see anything except flickering shadows from the malfunctioning emergency lighting.

A hand touches his spinal strut, low, and cups his aft. First Aid lets out a tiny, startled whoop of his siren before he cuts his vocal synthesizer. Vortex presses up against him from behind, snickering, "Oh, aren't you cute."

"Primus, you scared the slag out of me," First Aid says, readjusting his ruffled plating while Vortex rubs his cheek against First Aid’s shoulder. He doesn't shake Vortex off, no matter how indignant he feels. "Don’t sneak up on me. I could've shot you if I had my blaster."

"What are you doing out of the berth?" Unconcerned, Vortex grazes his mouth over First Aid's collar, making him shiver. "I had very big plans for you."

"Checking the scans. I left the monitors running while we were occupied." He puts his hand over Vortex's, halting its descent on his abdominal plating.

As much as he'd like to haul Vortex back to the berth and wallow around in a stupor for a while longer, he's got more work to do.

"I've got a better idea since we're out of the berth now," Vortex says, voice rasping over First Aid's audial. "How about you hop up on this console and I see how deep I can get my tongue in your pretty little valve?"

Vortex is extremely distracting. First Aid squirms in Vortex's grip, then says, "Tempting, but the motion detector picked something up."

There’s an abrupt shift in the mood. Vortex lets go of First Aid and reaches past him, pulling up the security log. "You sure there was no one else on board except me?"

"If there is someone else, they're completely dodging the scans," First Aid says. He pulls up the logs and finds nothing. "I don't see anything. It could be another sensor glitch — the whole ship is a mess. I've been getting false reports of movement since I entered scanning range."

"What if they're not false reports?" Vortex asks. He leans over the console and finds a security camera feed near the engine room that actually works, panning the camera as far as he can to the right.

First Aid doesn't see anything out of place at first. A maintenance vent dangling open, the cover hanging loose by a single bolt. A blown out emergency bulb, the housing cracked. First Aid nudges Vortex’s hand away from the controls and pans back.

The fallen vent cover. Like the one outside the spark containment facility. It could be a coincidence, or it could be something else entirely.

Is there someone else on the Acid Rain? Had there been someone watching them? The thought sends an unsettling chill through him.

Vortex taps the screen. "Something in there, maybe?"

"I don't know what it'd be," First Aid says, frowning at it, uneasy.

"A stowaway?" Vortex looks at him. "Something moved in after the ship stalled out, maybe?"

Some thing. First Aid really doesn't like that phrasing. He can't argue it's a mech, though — he's been scanning for spark signatures for hours and the only Cybertronian matches are the two of them.

"Access logs for the airlocks?" First Aid suggests.

They go through them one by one, even the massive cargo doors. Nothing. They're clean. All the points of access line up with the manifest, the escape pod launch times, or First Aid's entry and exit.

"Could have come inside at one of the hull breaches," Vortex says thoughtfully. "Wouldn't be on the logs."

He pulls up the sensor data already downloaded from the Acid Rain, filtering for Cybertronian-standard energy readings. There's a massive burst of relatively normal activity at the beginning, guards moving regularly about the ship, guards and support staff moving from workstation to living quarters and back. Abruptly, as the astrogation data puts the Acid Rain near its current location, it grows increasingly more patchy and sporadic as it scans through chronologically.

The entire sector of the medical facilities, including spark containment, is an empty black mark on the sensor map. Mechs go past the door and disappear. That makes no sense.

"That's not exactly comforting," First Aid says. "Some of the historical data from these lower medical sectors is completely corrupted." He brings up the three dimensional blueprints and flips the model of the Acid Rain around. "And this part of the ship looks like it's been entirely open to space for at least a few million years."

"We could leave," Vortex says.

"I have more to do." First Aid drums his fingers on the console. "I could get the work done in two hours if you help. If we're fast."

Vortex tilts his head and says, "Yes," but offers no further clarification or opinion. First Aid doesn't like his sudden lack of input. There's no arguing, just a flat, steady tone of disapproval.

"Come on. Let's get back aboard and get this done with as quickly as possible," First Aid says, turning and striding away from the console without checking to see if Vortex follows. "This whole fragging ship is one bad impact from disintegrating into space dust."

They make a detour first; First Aid comes to a stop by a locker and activates the security panel. Vortex asks, "What's in this one?"

"Weapons. You're a better shot than me." First Aid punches in the code, not bothering to hide it. He figures if Vortex was going to stage some sort of hijacking, he would've done it while First Aid was vulnerable. Or before they fragged. "If you're right and there is someone on the ship, it's better if we're both armed."

Vortex puts his arm casually over First Aid's shoulder, leaning in. "You sure you want to put a weapon in the hands of a hardened criminal?" His smirking, amused tone falls slightly flat.

"Why? Are you going to shoot me in the back with it?" First Aid asks, tipping his face up in challenge. His spark contracts. Vortex is looking at him a lot like he did the night before.

Vortex lifts his hand and cups First Aid's face, running his thumb below First Aid's lip. "Wouldn't dream of it."

The edge of his claw snags on First Aid's lower lip, and he leans in to kiss First Aid. Heat rushes through First Aid's frame, the first flicker of charge rousing in his lines. He plants his palm in the center of Vortex's chest, holding him so the only points of contact are their mouths and hands.

Any more and his resolve might collapse.

Vortex breaks the kiss to nose along First Aid's cheek. First Aid turns his face to the side. "You're trying to keep me distracted."

"Don't particularly like the idea of you boarding that death trap." Vortex skims his knuckles down First Aid's throat, down his chest. Last night, he'd bitten there, scraping his fangs against metal, and First Aid's array contracts involuntarily at the memory. Right now, he's wearing a look First Aid can't interpret. "I could make it worth your time not to go back."

"I don't have time for fragging around." First Aid gives him a gentle push backwards. "There are mechs relying on me."

Vortex straightens, at the end of his protests, expression smoothing. He holds his hand out, making a beckoning gesture. "Let's see what I'm working with, then."

"No arguments?" First Aid pulls the weapons locker open and steps aside. He figures Vortex will know best how to arm himself.

A shrug. "I'm perfectly willing to put a blaster round in the face of whatever tries to stop you."

First Aid doesn't have a full armory, but he has enough firepower in inventory to seriously discourage any attempts at boarding his shuttle without permission.

After a moment of deliberation, Vortex pulls out a blaster rifle and tilts it back and forth, inspecting the firing mechanism. He checks the safety, powers it up with the muzzle pointed away from them, then slings the heavy duty harness strap over one shoulder. "Not my usual, but this'll work."

Satisfied they're both equipped, First Aid shoulders his pry bar and lantern, and leads the way back onto the Acid Rain as quickly as he can towing an empty cargo carrier. Vortex follows without comment, long legs eating up the distance.

The interior of the ship is no different from their trek back out, the same ominously encroaching dark interspersed by flickering lights, but First Aid's plating prickles with an awareness of every unexplained sound. He wonders what Vortex must hear with his RADAR suite when he wordlessly takes point, tilting his head occasionally towards a side hallway without pausing.

They reach the elevator banks quickly, the route and hazards familiar and thoroughly mapped. The doors hiss open as soon as First Aid presses the controls. He wheels his cart inside and it's patently apparent both of them won't fit in at the same time with their cargo.

"We shouldn't split up," Vortex says, blocking the elevator door from closing.

"It's less than two minutes," First Aid says, reassuring even though his dorsal plating twitches at the idea of putting his unguarded back to any stretch of empty hallway. "Even if there's someone close enough to find me that fast, I'm sure I can keep them busy for the duration of an elevator ride."

"I don't like this," Vortex says. His plating ripples open and then closed from shoulder to hip, a displeased gesture.

First Aid frowns at him. "I have a weapon. I'll be fine."

"We can come back up for the rest," Vortex says, which is a perfectly reasonable solution to whatever anxiety he's experiencing.

"Or I could get started." First Aid steps forward as the door buzzes a warning, plucking a transponder from his subspace compartment. "Here. So you can see I'm fine."

He reaches up and reaches under Vortex's fairing collar, clipping the device directly over a data cable. First Aid repeats the process on himself and engages the sync function on each device.

There's a tingle as the transponders connect. His HUD'S data feed fills with Vortex's vital statistics in real time and he can feel his own uplink begin broadcasting to Vortex.

"That should work in a one klik radius, barring severe electronic interference," First Aid says. He puts his hand over Vortex's chassis, where his spark chamber is, and tilts his head as he follows the feed. The soft hum under his palm matches the readouts; the device is accurate within picoseconds. "Is that enough reassurance for you to leave me alone for a few minutes?"

Vortex looks momentarily like he won't be letting First Aid leave without him, even with the tracker, but he releases the door, saying, "Don't go wandering off."

The elevator slides closed on the sight of him fanning out his blades in obvious agitation.

First Aid takes a steadying ventilation. There are worse things than having thirty tons of weaponry brooding over your safety. He'd have given a limb to have someone with heavy weaponry show that much concern for him at any point during the war.

Maybe it really was a mistake for First Aid to frag him. He drums his fingers on the cart as the elevator begins its descent, turning that thought over in his processes.

First Aid didn't have a chance to look too carefully at Vortex's processor output alongside his function's suite. He's a highly clever weapon, built for a paramilitary function, to protect and secure a single target. That kind of thing isn't compulsory — Vortex's hardware capabilities can't ever compel him to care about his charge — but a long stint in spark containment and an extreme helping of positive reinforcement could easily create a sense of intense attachment. And the protectiveness would come naturally with a heightened awareness of potential dangers. The Acid Rain is a minefield as far as First Aid is concerned. He can't even begin to imagine what Vortex's perception of it is.

He's still mulling it over when the elevator doors slide open with a soft chime. He steps forward and blocks the door from closing, but doesn't exit, remembering the fallen grate outside the spark containment facility.

At the time, it seemed highly unlikely another mech was squeezing through the ventilation ducts or crawling through maintenance hatches. Now, the odds are slightly higher. Especially when it might not be a mech at all.

First Aid wheels the cart slowly out into the corridor and towards the spark containment facility. He nears his destination and slows, abandoning the cart, his feet carrying him past the opening to spark containment storage.

Down the hallway, a door is open where a door wasn't open before.

*

The glyphs above the machine room are illegible, but the sound alone and proximity to the storage facility give him some clue to its purpose even before consulting the ship's map. A large bank of cryopods needs an equally large cooling apparatus.

A light is on inside, dull and flickering. The deep hum of the industrial equipment is muffled by the bulkhead, but grows louder as he edges cautiously towards the opening, blaster in hand.

First Aid peers into the door, scanning for hostiles. He lowers his weapon, vaguely nonplussed; except for what he'd expect to find in a refrigeration facility, the room is empty. After a moment, he holsters his blaster and steps into the open doorway. The air is wet and scorching, like stepping into a jungle on an alien planet, the sound of trickling coolant underpinned by the low vibration of the gargantuan compressors.

The open space closest to the door is dominated by massive holding tanks full of refrigerant. Pipes sprout from the top and bottom, pumps working to circulate the contents through the huge banks of condenser coils that travel the length of the long, narrow room. Steam billows from half a dozen places, a cracked exhaust port pumping off heat instead of diverting it to an exterior air handler.

First Aid meanders into the center of the room, frowning. The banks of condenser coils are massive, twice as tall as First Aid. Opposite the condenser, where the pipes grow frosty even in the sweltering heat, the coils disappear into the bulkhead, routing through the cryopods in frame storage.

Cybertronian tech is built to stand the test of time, but from the temperature, it's shocking the system is still functioning at all. The air isn't hot enough to melt whatever material the pipes are made from, but First Aid spots signs of scorching around the exhaust manifold where cheaper metals were used. His own paint is already starting to feel slightly tacky to the touch, not hot enough to melt, but warm enough to feel strange, slightly itchy.

First Aid flips on his spotlight and makes a quick exploration of the rear of the room. There's no one here. No obvious reason for the door to have opened at all. A sensor malfunction might explain it, but after the fallen grating and the alert from the engine room, his dorsal plating prickles with apprehension.

He turns back towards the entrance empty-handed, thinking of all the frames still in storage, the good, useful parts wasted if the coolant system fails. He'll have to send a message for a salvage ship as soon as they're back on his shuttle. Maybe even check the cryopods for other malignancies before they leave. A failure in the coolant system could mean a failure in the others as well, less obvious and more insidious.

An eerie scraping noise rasps at the edge of his auditory sensor's lower range and First Aid's footsteps quicken, driven by a sudden, unexpected sense he should leave this place as quickly as possible. Vortex should be down the elevator by now, but hasn't come to investigate. Maybe he's hunting for First Aid between the rows of frame storage, or maybe he's been delayed by something else entirely. A needling feeling of anxiety rockets through First Aid's lines.

He reaches for the tracker feed, but finds the signal muddy with some sort of interference from the ship's electromagnetics. Maybe this is what was interfering with the spark signatures on the security recordings.

Slag.

This whole place is a death trap waiting to spring. Vortex was right. They shouldn't have split up.

A wet sound slows him as he reaches the edge of the coolant towers. It's a dull, throbbing sensory pulse — and then he sees the source of it.

He hurries forward, his first assumption is it's some mech suffering some sort of hardware failure, bent and contorted. When his processor catches up to his optical input, he halts so quickly he nearly tips forward.

First Aid's seen blast victims after firebombings with more exterior plating left on their burning frames. It's not a mech, but something unnervingly like one. Whatever it is staggers into the room, towards the light and sound, and he gets a clear look at it.

First Aid recoils. It moves like it has severe mechanical damage, twitchy and aimless, bent over at the hips with its absurdly long arms hanging limply, as if they're an afterthought, until they nearly drag along the floor.

There's something very, very wrong with it.

It lifts its head roughly in First Aid's direction and fear bolts through him. All his plating cinches down painfully tight, as flat as he can make it, and he backs away as quietly as he can, trying to put as much space between himself and this not-mech as possible. He unholsters and raises his blaster, but his hands are trembling too much to get a bead on it.

He doesn't even know what part of it he'd shoot anyway: the thing seems mostly comprised of bare struts and slagged wire. He can't even tell what sectors might be exposed protoform, or if it even has any. A strange ichor coats its lower jaw and throat, greenish and almost iridescent, like a dripping accumulation of oil.

First Aid's medical processes go haywire, emergency protocols sprouting sub-trees, trying to understand how to proceed. He crushes them down mercilessly as self-preservation seizes priority. It looks dead but it's vertical, animated, seeking with some intelligence for the source of the disturbance First Aid generated during his investigation. He closes down his ventilations completely, fighting against confused internal alerts bleating urgently for him to run, to hide, to bolt directly past it.

There's nowhere for him to go but deeper into the room, so First Aid backs away, careful to keep his footfalls slow and light. He brings up the ship's map in his HUD, tracing probable escape routes.

Nothing. No exit door in the rear of the facility. Just the outer hull and the dead quiet of empty vacuum beyond it.

The thing begins to straighten, levering itself upright with jerky movements. First Aid has the distinct feeling he shouldn't let it see him, that if it discovers he's there, he'll be dead in seconds flat.

His foot connects with hard metal — loose debris, a bolt or empty canister. It rolls noisily out of sight, clattering across the metal grating.

The creature makes a violent hissing sound and swings its narrow head towards the sound, bobbing it up and down like a predator scenting prey.

First Aid doesn't run. He doesn't move at all, frozen in place. The thing still doesn't seem to know he's there yet, seeking after the direction of the canister, but tension ripples along his plating in anticipation of it spotting him. It has optics, its head now turned far enough towards First Aid he can see one, a single point of light flickering in a recessed divot in its cranial casing, the shape unsettlingly organic with Cybertronian facial mesh stripped away.

It turns its face away, seeking, a snuffling, chuffing sound coming from its vents, a rasping wheeze of obstructed airflow. It's mechanoid, not techno-organic. The underlying construction seems to be Cybertronian, but First Aid's never seen anything like it before, not even documented in studies of severe frame deterioration or wild outlier mutations.

When it turns to the side, First Aid makes a break for it as stealthily as possible. One step turns into two, into five, until he's put distance between it and himself.

First Aid squeezes behind the far end of the compressor engine and the outer wall, dimming his sparse biolights and blacking out his visor. The only source of light in the shadowy outer edge of the room is the faint glow of his own optics, hidden behind the semi-opaque acrylic.

Fear claws at him, unbalancing him. First Aid doesn't have a plan. He could hide and wait for Vortex to find him, but he has no idea how dangerous this thing is. It could easily kill Vortex and come for First Aid next.

His spinal strut hits the bulkhead behind him, a dull sound. He flinches, freezing. The creature swings its head around, tilting it. It growls, a sound like gears grinding or an engine failing to start.

He burrows further behind the column of condenser coils, initiating a partial transformation to flatten himself down to fit through the gap. The squeeze is painful, the metal so cold here it burns across his haptic sensors, but he makes it past and nearly collapses, bracing himself unsteadily against the bulkhead.

Abruptly, it's filling the gap in front of him, pressed between two freezing condenser coils with a virulent hiss. The optics are deep-set, a dim color flickering an unsteady yellow-gold, and fixed directly on First Aid.

A dripping, sharp-tipped appendage coils out from the thin frame, the narrow limb seeking blindly through the opening. First Aid flattens himself as tightly as he can against the bulkhead, edging to the side.

The end of the tentacle scrapes past along the wall, dripping with the same oily substance coating its face. It looks strangely organic, the limb lined with seeking cilia and spiked metal teeth. First Aid’s fuel tanks threaten to purge as a strange, sickly smell batters his olfactory sensors even through his filtration mask.

A long, bare arm slips into the gap, Cybertronian anatomy stripped down to nothing but naked struts and corroded flexor cabling, actuators grinding audibly. A tentacle whips past in one direction, grazing First Aid's plating, then roils back in the other direction in a slick, exploratory slide over his chest and throat. It smears a thick slime across his plating, stinking of old energon and cloying coolant.

The creature makes a low humming noise, its grisly, split face flaring open almost gently to expose a strange, vertical maw, the distribution of fangs and feelers bizarrely uneven and organic, like the inside of some carnivorous Earth flora.

Then, as abruptly as they came, the creature and its seeking tentacles withdraw. First Aid holds himself perfectly still for a moment and then, when he hears nothing from the other side of the gap, creeps into motion again.

He squeezes out past the other side of the machinery and edges along the bulkhead through the narrow access corridor, heading towards the exit door.

When he circles around one of the big refrigerant tanks close to the door, he comes face to face with it, nothing between them.

First Aid stumbles backwards, fuel pump surging. All of his plating snaps down tightly as he flinches away from it, fear hitting seconds before his combat threat assessment completes. All his disused battlefield tactical defense systems boot in an attempt to correct his tactical trajectory, but the emotional response already has him in its grip.

It leaps at him. He puts his hands up and braces himself, but it latches on to his shoulders and bears him down to the ground. They hit the deck with a strut-rattling impact, the sound of his plating hitting metal as loud as a blaster round being fired at close range.

First Aid recovers and freezes. The creature crouches on top of him, a warble escaping its vocal synthesizer, and touches his face almost inquisitively with the tips of its long, spindly claws. The bare joints are battered, scraped down to wiring and exposed actuators. They move with a hitch as the creature drags its digits down his throat, collar, and chest plating.

He can't help but pity it. It's difficult for him to see any kind of mech in this bad of a state of disrepair — even whatever this thing is.

The thing's glimmering optics brighten in the hollow, skull-like cranial casing. Abruptly, its face splits and First Aid has a front row seat to the strange internal mechanisms serving as a mouth. Fear rapidly overtakes any pity he might have felt and his spark leaps in his chamber as it descends to close its mouth awkwardly over his cheek and lower jaw.

The inside of its mouth is slick with some sort of oral lubricant, dripping to pool in his mechanics, thick and unpleasant.

First Aid turns his head to the side, but that does nothing to stop it; it only keeps coming, a terrifying number of tentacles coiling around him, probing his joints. It scrapes its blunt, bare-jointed fingers over his plating. The creature's maw hovers over his face and it spreads its jaws wide, a dripping tongue sliding wet over his filtration mask and then down his neck, the texture slimy one way and scraping the other. There's a wet, huffing indrawn ventilation from the thing, rapid and excited, as it explores down the center of his chest and stops to lave at the midpoint seam.

The jagged fingertips come up to claw almost frantically at his plating and the open mouth scrapes at his paint, the strange teeth catching on seams. First Aid flinches back and puts his hand up to push it gently away and it hisses at him, tentacles tightening painfully around him.

There's a flare inside his spark chamber, a terrible pull, and the creature lets out a coaxing rumble, the sound between a growl and a croon.

In a moment of white-hot terror, First Aid gives a soft cry, thinking only of the smoked out spark containers, all the lids removed. This thing must have eaten them. He shoves at it harder. The sharp screech his struggling prompts is audial-blasting.

Sparkeater.

A kind of panic he's never felt before rears its head, crashing over him in wave after wave, paralyzing.

It rears back and whips one of the sharp-ended tentacles at his chassis and First Aid stiffens with pain. The tip punctures the seam directly below his chest plating and twists, yanking the metal out of alignment with shearing force in a burst of nearly blinding pain.

His thrashing becomes a panicked scrabbling at metal and wiring. First Aid digs his fingers into unyielding metal, trying to find purchase anywhere he can deal damage. His fingertips snag on a strut and he wrenches hard. Hot, sour fluid sprays over his face and the sparkeater screeches, clawing at First Aid's chassis.

So many things happen in rapid succession First Aid is left dazed on the metal grating: A sound that isn't the sparkeater rises above the dull roar of the machinery. It hisses and slithers off of First Aid, head raised, twisting towards the noise, evidently discouraged from, its meal by the pain and distracted by the noise. A bright flash and a dull explosion pops through the small space. The sparkeater reels back, mouth flared open, clutching at its face.

First Aid's visor filters out the flash but it doesn't stop the ringing in his audials or do anything to stop the dusting of shrapnel pinging off his plating. A hand grabs him from behind and pulls him away. They stagger into the hallway, the shock of the temperature change making First Aid's plating contract.

"Where did you get a stun grenade?" First Aid asks once his vocal synthesizer is capable of doing anything more than emitting distressed clicks. Vortex is moving him, hand gripping First Aid's elbow painfully tight, so he has no choice but to stumble after Vortex.

"There was a busted munitions locker adjacent to frame storage. Picked it up as insurance," Vortex says, darting a narrow, slightly abashed look towards First Aid. "In case you were actually some kind of slaver. Stole a scalpel and one of your stasis clamps, too."

First Aid blinks a few times to try to clear his vision. The absurdity of it strikes him. "Good thinking."

"Come on," Vortex says, which seems repetitive, since First Aid is already being dragged along at a clip. "It won't be distracted for long."

They reach a junction in the dark hallway and Vortex stops so suddenly First Aid collides with him and stays there, shivering strangely. Error messages sprout too quickly for him to triage so he temporarily dismisses them all in a batch as they start to bog down his processing.

"What are you doing?" First Aid asks as Vortex yanks on a panel above them. Only belatedly, he realizes it's a maintenance access hatch.

"Putting some space between us," Vortex says as he starts climbing.

First Aid fumbles with his grip on the rungs, his hands strangely clumsy. Somewhere behind them the sparkeater screeches again and fear bolts through First Aid's chassis. He slips near the top, barely catching himself on the lip of the hatch with one hand. Vortex reaches down and grips First Aid's collar, hauling First Aid up into the maintenance corridor with him.

Vortex yanks the ladder up after them, then turns and embraces First Aid. A wave of confusion grips First Aid until he realizes he's whining, a desperate, panicked sound that he doesn't realize he's been making. First Aid cuts the output from his vocal synthesizer before another horrible, trembling sob can escape, and falls against Vortex in pained relief, face buried against the sturdy metal of Vortex's collar.

Somewhere below, the creature — the sparkeater, Primus, an actual sparkeater — screeches its frustration for its lost meal. First Aid leans on Vortex for a moment longer, holding a hand over the gash in his side, the metal still weeping energon, and at Vortex's coaxing they go hobbling deeper into the ship together.

*

They pass in and out of total darkness, the only light spilling in from below them through the cracks in the deck.

Navigating without being able to see more than a decimeter in front of his face is nothing short of terrifying and he's so disoriented from the attack he has no idea which direction they're facing, much less their trajectory. First Aid keeps a smothering grip on his fear, refusing to let it run rampant in his processor, and wills his legs to keep moving forward. Wherever they're going, it's away from the sparkeater.

Vortex pauses periodically, emitting radio bursts. They scrape at the edges of First Aid's sensory suite, nothing like the ticklish, close-range scan in the medbay. Full-powered, the effect verges on painful.

One hand on Vortex's back, First Aid uses the other to feel gingerly around bent paneling. The damage is mostly superficial, but painful, a piece of paneling wedged up so tightly beneath his transformation cog it only grinds and rattles when he tries to engage it.

First Aid's lines itch, an unusual pressure in them, a virulent feeling.

He stumbles against the bulkhead as Vortex comes to a halt at a junction in the tunnel. The corridor is only dimly lit from below by emergency lighting pouring through an access grate. First Aid slides down into a crouch, leaning against a support beam, and dips his fingers into the hole in his chassis. They come out again gleaming with energon and another fluid he can't identify, the same oily, greenish substance dripping from the sparkeater's mouth.

First Aid's motor function grows tacky with blips of unresponsiveness. His actuators are shaking, which shouldn't be possible without massive circuit destabilization. Tries to flex his fingers all the way open, then clenches them hard into a fist when they don't cooperate.

Vortex crouches close and touches the rim of the damaged metal with the tips of his claws. "It worse than it looks?"

"Something's wrong," First Aid says as softly as he can manage. His voice sounds rough, distorted, and when he finally engages an internal scan his diagnostics go haywire, his internal monitoring throwing out bizarre, conflicting error messages as quickly as he can look at them.

And then there's the fear. He's pushed it down as tightly as he can, but it's like plunging downhill at full speed, no brakes, towards the edge of a cliff.

There's a sound from below, and suddenly Vortex isn't looking at him. It gives him a moment to try to pull himself together. First Aid retreats into his processes, sorting numbly through the data. Things become strange, distorted.

Think. Think. It's hard to think. Why's it hard to think?

Vortex prompts him, barely audible, "Do you have any idea what it was?"

"A sparkeater," First Aid says, blinking down at his ooze-coated hand. He rubs his fingers together — the substance is already growing tacky and gelatinous. Vitreous, maybe, growing tacky inside him. "There aren't any reliable accounts of them."

"Thought they were fake," Vortex says. He hunches further down, turning his back to First Aid, keeping watch down the corridor the way they came. First Aid doesn't miss the way Vortex blocks First Aid's frame from view with his own. "Slag you say to newbuilds to scare them."

"There's a mechanical basis for being able to process spark energy as a fuel source," First Aid says distantly. "I've seen so much slag the Functionist government did to mechs before the war it wouldn't surprise me if they were trying to create one intentionally. Shockwave did worse to mechs than make monsters."

Vortex shoots him a disbelieving look. "Senator Shockwave? I thought he got offed?"

First Aid suddenly feels very tired, even beyond the injury, his thoughts muddled. He can't explain right now and he doesn't particularly want to. It's a piece of Functionist malice that can stay in the historical archives, for all First Aid cares. "I only gave you the abridged version."

"Whatever it is, it's between us and your shuttle now," Vortex says. "We have to get around it."

"Let's get out of here then," First Aid says and tries to push himself to his feet. A wave of dizziness hits him, punctuated by a query to purge his fuel tanks. His internal scans are showing inconclusive for a match on whatever the sparkeater injected him with, but he's got a bad feeling that he's going to find out the full extent of its effects much sooner rather than later. "I need to get to my medical supplies."

"You good to walk?" Vortex asks doubtfully, then catches First Aid under the arms as he stumbles. "You're not."

First Aid's optical input starts to grow blurry around the edges. His medical monitoring floods his processes with an alarming number of foreign substance alerts, too numerous and aggressive to be suppressed.

He blinks away the scattered artifacts in his visual input and devotes an entire processing core to analysis of the chemical compound coursing through his lines. That's it. That's it. Now he needs to know how to fix it before it makes it impossible to think at all. "It's intermittent."

"What's intermittent?"

"Thinking," First Aid says. Frag. He clings to Vortex's shoulder. "Need to go. I can walk for now."

Vortex gives him a doubting look, but helps him back into motion. They don't have much choice but to try to keep pushing ahead. First Aid leans heavily against Vortex's side, which is incongruously cold even though Vortex runs palpably warmer than First Aid.

A few hundred meters down the maintenance corridor, his actuators lock on the left side and he sags. Vortex grabs him around the waist before he crashes to the ground. He doesn't need clear medical data to form a hypothesis when the physical effects are becoming so patently obvious. "It's some kind of circuit disruptor profusing through my fuel lines. My scans aren't working."

"How do we fix it?" Vortex asks, groping at First Aid’s damaged panel like the answer is there. It doesn't do any harm, so First Aid doesn't put a stop to it.

"Going to open a subspace compartment," First Aid says, prying at the access in his thigh before it's too late. His fingers don't quite work, but the panel comes open. "Green cylinder with a red safety cap."

Vortex fishes it out on the first try and flips it over to look at it, his expression going almost comically surprised beneath his visor. "You trying to off yourself? This is syk."

"It isn’t," First Aid says, clutching at his forearm. His fine motor control is already fragged. "It's a synthetic chelating agent mixed with a medical grade circuit booster so I don’t go into protective shutdown before it starts working. You'll have to inject it into the ventral processing corridor, six centimeters below my midline."

Vortex takes it and grips First Aid by his neck, pulling his head down without a flicker of hesitation. First Aid rests his brow against Vortex's shoulder and closes his optics, bracing himself for the inevitable pain. "Ready?"

A deep ventilation. Then out. Vortex's claws tense, dig into metal. The pressure anchors him.

The booster hisses and the injector tip connects with a fuel line. Pain blooms outward, incredible, like having a laser scalpel taken directly to his spinal strut. It's not supposed to feel anything like that. Even Vortex's touch feels like fire on his haptics. He digs his fingers into Vortex's plating and moans.

Vortex drops the empty cartridge and puts both arms around First Aid. "Slag. Did I frag it up?"

First Aid can't immediately answer, fighting against a confusing new wave of error messages. His fluid pressure gauge bottoms out, like he's hemorrhaging fuel, but when he looks down there's only the thin, thready drip of energon congealing in his chassis. He pushes his fingers inside the injury and they come away wet, but not dripping.

Everything is upside down for a moment. Optical input flickers and his audial calibration resets itself, the filters collapsing, so he can hear everything, the dull empty roar of the ship's mechanics, of Vortex, even the faint hum of his own spark oscillating steadily.

Slowly, it recedes. He feels it washing out of him, tidal. Vortex holds him the entire time, a hand around the back of First Aid's head, a wall of warm, clean metal. First Aid presses his face harder into the gap between Vortex's collar and chin. Vortex's embrace feels, at least temporarily, like a refuge.

"I think I'll be fine," First Aid finally says once he steadies out, even though he's definitely in pretty bad shape. He gently pushes Vortex’s hand away so he can check the rest of the damage. A strange wave of nausea hits him, generating little flickers of electrical feedback through his chassis, but his filters are already hard at work scrubbing the inert venom. "Mostly. Not transforming anytime soon."

"How long does your booster take to fix you?" Vortex asks.

First Aid doesn't bother correcting him. He's already scanning the data on his visor HUD, which is more noise than actual signal. "It's already working. ETA thirty six minutes for full clear." He doesn't have the data to calculate it correctly. "Probably."

"Think you can walk now?" Vortex puts his arm around First Aid, this time entirely avoiding the bent plating, and hoists him upright. "We shouldn't stay here long."

"If I have to." He feels more even-keeled now, but it's accompanied by the knowledge another attack will be fatal. The potential outcomes are poor, unless they can find some way to kill it or escape. "Is it close?"

"I don't think so, but this location is impossible to secure," Vortex says. He tilts his head, then gives it a shake, like he can hear a sound First Aid can't. "You got some kind of map you want to share with me?"

First Aid tries to open his data jack cover, but it stays firmly shut. The manual catch works, but his fingers still won't cooperate, clumsy. "Help me with this."

Vortex leans First Aid against the bulkhead, steadying him, and uses his other hand to coax the cover of the data port open. The cable slots in with a click and First Aid shudders at the rough handshake protocol as it grates over his processes. The one way connection sends a sizzling wave of feedback along his haptics and he pushes the data packet upstream.

"Got it," Vortex says, his tac visor flickering. He reaches down for the end of the cable and kisses First Aid as he pulls the plug. First Aid opens his mouth nearly by reflex, startled into it, and gets a databurst of raw want layered with fierce protectiveness. "There's a bank of elevators and a guard post on this side of the mess hall, quarter of a klik fore."

First Aid hobbles along beside Vortex, his concentration fixed on remaining upright and sorting out the mess of junk data his self-monitoring is throwing at him. The chelating agent is working, because his joints feel less like they're gummed up with tar and he doesn't pitch face forward onto the deck every time he takes another step, but every noise and every motion remains gratingly unpleasant.

They don't slow until they're within a hundred meters of the guard station. Vortex stops next to an access ladder and lowers it, climbing down first and then helping First Aid into the main corridor. They stick even closer out in the open, arms brushing as they move, Vortex with his hand ready on his blaster. Vortex peers around the corner when they reach the junction, then steps out into the open, beckoning First Aid to follow.

The guard post in question is in marginally better repair than the one he passed boarding the Acid Rain, but only barely. The acoustic paneling overhead is partially collapsed, wires sagging into the space like overgrown vines.

First Aid looks over the elevators. There are no obvious controls or proximity readers. "Must be in the security booth. This set leads directly up to the bridge."

"Can you get it open?" Vortex asks, hefting his blaster. "If not, I can pop the lock the old fashioned way."

First Aid reaches in past the inactive hardlight shielding and forcibly pries off the door controls from the other side, wires sparking and then fizzling uselessly. The mag lock clicks almost immediately. Luckily for them, old as slag ships have old as slag security.

Vortex tilts his head, watching First Aid with open interest, and gestures for First Aid to enter first.

Their passage kicks up puffs of dust as they enter the guard post. First Aid wipes a hand across his damaged filtration mask, half out of habit, half to dispel the queasy wave of sensation pulsing through him every time he moves too quickly. He pushes cabling away from his face, moving slowly so nothing snags his armor.

The confined space feels more like a shooting gallery instead of a temporary haven.

It's tempting to slump against the bulkhead and rest until his vitals improve, but the sparkeater could be anywhere, go anywhere. Fear keeps him moving forward.

They need to see what they're doing. Anything. Find out what they're dealing with, where they're going, where the sparkeater is or where it could be going. The guard station has a bank of monitors sitting above a massive control console. The lights are off, but the glyphs on the input wake when he rubs his hand across them. He blows away the dust and presses the power button. A few screens flicker on, displaying only blank gray squares.

"What are you doing?" Vortex asks when First Aid gets down on one knee in front of the network maintenance panel.

"Signal’s slag and we don't have any visuals on the situation," First Aid says. It's locked down tight, but he gets a fingerhold and pulls, wrenching at the seam. The sound of metal bending makes him wince. "Maybe we can get an idea of where it is."

"You some kind of hacker?" Vortex is darting sideways glances at what First Aid’s doing even as he’s keeping an optic on the empty corridor. Maybe First Aid is imagining it, but he sounds mildly incredulous.

Rewiring a shoddy control panel to bypass a security scanner hardly qualifies as hacking.

"Not really," First Aid says, stripping the wire bare with his teeth and braiding it into one of his patch cables. It's a clumsy process with the circuit disruptor, but he's regaining function in his fingers even though there's a distinct half-numb tingling. "These old consoles are easy to crack if you've done it before. Functionist tech was always installed by the lowest bidder."

He looks up to see Vortex staring back at him, head tilted in consideration. First Aid looks back, strangely certain that there's something to be said here, something tectonic between them in this moment, but as he's about to ask what Vortex is thinking, the connection succeeds and everything blinks awake under his hand.

Half of the screens above the security console flicker with new input, the peripheral monitors now mostly black or errored out. He navigates to the nearest working bank of cameras labeled MESS HALL, which is directly in the middle of a potential route back to the shuttle. "Here we go."

There are dead bodies in the mess. Dozens of them.

An alert pops up flagging a security event for roughly the time the Acid Rain went missing.

First Aid pauses with his hand over the controls. There's a security recording. First Aid looks up at Vortex and hits play.

*

On the screen, a group of heavily armed guards herd a knot of shackled mechs into the mess hall.

There's no audio for the recording, but First Aid can make out the guards speaking to one another, alert but not tense. Several clusters of guards and ship crew are scattered randomly at the tables, ignoring the prisoners as they enter. This must be part of some ordinary routine if no one spares a second glance towards them. Nothing suggests anything out of the ordinary is happening.

Just as First Aid is about to write off the footage as inconsequential, one of the tall, slender mechs in the center of the group of prisoners doubles over, cuffed hands clutched awkwardly over his chest plating. A guard steps forward and nudges the prisoner in the hip with the stock of his rifle and speaks inaudibly with an annoyed expression.

The prisoner turns, groping with bound hands for the guard. A sharp spike of sympathy goes through First Aid at the distress he spots there — of fear, naked and obvious.

First Aid flinches when the rifle comes down on the prisoner's head, then recoils physically at what happens next.

The prisoner bursts open, armor splitting completely down the middle in a grisly partial transformation.

First Aid forces himself to watch as the scene erupts into chaos and violence. He thinks, after the initial shock, he can predict what's going to happen next, but what's on the screen is much worse; he rears back in blank shock and dismay. Vortex puts a hand on his shoulder, steadying, and stares at the carnage unfolding without comment.

Tentacles flail, lashing out around it as the guards stumble backwards in what seems like slow motion. Gory gouts of energon follow almost too quickly to register. It takes blaster fire and shrugs it off. Mechs are ripped into pieces, prisoners and guards alike: chest casings shatter like cheap glass; punctured spark chambers go up like ball lightning, smoked out; one guard bursts apart in a fountain of parts.

Energon spills in waves from severed tubing. The guards not instantly killed in the original flailing retaliation start to slip and go down in their attempt at a panicked retreat.

It's over fast for so much violence. Less than two full minutes of footage, and then the sparkeater crouches over its prize, gorging on the bright, flickering anima of the last mech not extinguished. Emergency lights flash on the recording, the whole thing eerily silent without audio feed.

Vortex stares fixedly at the screen as the recording continues, his red optics narrowed nearly to slits behind his tac visor.

First Aid rubs a hand across his filtration mask, a cold feeling darting down his spinal strut. "Sixteen guards."

"Nineteen at least," Vortex says. He scrubs backwards through the footage, pausing halfway, and enters a command to playback at a quarter speed. Energy fire passes across from somewhere out of view. "They barely touched it."

"How the frag are we supposed to get past it?" First Aid is unable to keep the dismay from his voice. "Or kill it?"

"We should leave," Vortex says, twisting to look behind them at the empty hallway, hand on the blaster rifle.

"Not yet." First Aid pops the remainder of the control panel out of the housing, exposing the main data uplink. He sets the panel carefully on the floor. A thick bundle of data cables runs through a conduit, routing for the security feed to be passed to the Acid Rain's core data banks. There's his way in.

He opens a subspace compartment and pulls out a heavy duty wire stripper, the kind meant to take meshed metal off cabling inside frontline mechs with military alts.

"What are you doing?" Vortex leans over to look at First Aid's open forearm.

"Seeing if I can find out where this thing came from." First Aid flicks his lantern on. The front is badly cracked from his encounter with the sparkeater, but it still works, so he pushes it at Vortex. "And if they made it, if they had some way of subduing it. Hold this."

He tugs a length of data cabling out of his arm and clips it near the connector. There's a scrape of pain, but it's only a drop in the bucket compared to the burning ache still in his lines.

First Aid hits the security protocols as quickly as the first time, but an idea's been percolating through the recesses of his processor since he first boarded. He's been going about this the wrong way.

He doesn't need security clearance — he needs medical clearance.

First Aid digs up the old credentials they used to crack open the Altihex labs, where the Functionists had been experimenting with weapons tech. A knot of apprehension lodges itself in his throat. He'd been in the exploration crew alongside Soundwave and had the distinct displeasure of witnessing how disposable Cybertronian population was considered before the war. Even Soundwave had looked silently at the files and then turned away with nothing to say.

The site had been condemned and the tech slagged down. It'd been nothing but a memorial for torture and pain, nothing useful for reconstruction.

First Aid offers the encryption key. The system blooms open for him, a cloud of old Functionist data at his fingertips. After their stop at the mining colony, the Acid Rain was bound for a black site outside Cybertronian territory. Better to keep the secrets — and better to keep the results of their experiment quarantined.

He finds what he's looking for in an unmarked file filled with research notes. There's no reason a prison transport would have any kind of research facility on it, so there's no reason it should have research notes.

First Aid scans subfile after subfile. The original subject was a cold constructed mech, no designation logged, only a serial number. Constructed without an alt mode, only built to be imprisoned.

He looks up at Vortex, a grim feeling settling in his lines. "This isn't a prison ship — or that's not all it is. It's a Functionist-sponsored weapons research program. They made that thing."

Vortex, watching the corridor, looks back at him. "What the slag were we for, then?"

"Testing," First Aid says. "That's why they retained your frames. They were going to let you loose on some planetoid and see how many of you it could hunt and kill before it died."

"Great," Vortex mutters. "You kill a couple enforcers and you're a lab experiment. You sure that slagger Megatron blew enough of them up?"

First Aid winces, even if he doesn't really disagree on this particular issue. "Pretty much all of them."

"Could sell a weapon like that and retire to some alien world, hmm?" Vortex asks, leaning his hip against the edge of the machinery. The words come out like he's testing an idea. "If things are as bad as you say they are."

Something like this would be worth an incredible amount of credits in the wrong hands. He can only guess how much the Black Block Consortia would pay for the ability to convert mechanical lifeforms into living weapons to consume Cybertronians. Cybertron is still vaguely sheltered by the auspices of a few tentative trade agreements with Galactic Council member planets, but the rising concern of resettling Cybertron is a distinct lack of planetary defense.

A weapon like this would bypass even the most well-armed flotilla. Drop a dozen sparkeaters in a local population center and watch fear and terror destroy the populace as the sparkeaters wreaked havoc.

An enemy almost impossible to kill with standard Cybertronian weapons.

He looks up at Vortex, who's looking at First Aid. Carefully, First Aid asks, "You want that?"

A grim thread of misery lodges itself in his spark. He thinks about the blaster at his hip and if he'd be able to shoot first if Vortex answers yes. He's not foolish. One night of fragging doesn't make loyalty. He waits in silence, optics fixed on Vortex's expressionless face.

The moment between them seems like it lasts forever, but it's only a few seconds. Vortex blinks once, mouth twitching, and drops his gaze from First Aid's face down the line of his frame, and shrugs his shoulder with a calculated nonchalance.

First Aid flushes, his plating contracting. Evidently one night of fragging's plenty for Vortex.

Vortex turns back to his self-appointed guard duty, scanning the corridor again with his hand on the stock of his blaster rifle. His blades are nearly vertical, but his tone is even and easy when he glances over his shoulder and says, "I don't give a slag. You want to sell it, up to you. You want to slag the data bank? Show me where to shoot."

The tension building in First Aid evaporates, replaced by relief. "Let's find out if we can kill it, first."

First Aid turns back to his search.

The mechanism for reproducing the sparkeater transformation is documented in the research files, clearly labeled as such. He doesn't open the methodology. He doesn't want the knowledge in his memory banks, not a single byte more of it than he needs.

First Aid touches his side, which is still tacky with the ichorous substance it left behind. He was correct about it being a circuit disruptor. Left untended, it would've induced paralysis, pain, and hallucinations. If he was alone, he could've walked right into the sparkeater's mouth without knowing it.

The data unfolds. Specs, method of containment, methods of disposal. He selects the log and expands each category. There's an immense amount of data. The sparkeater process took millennia to develop, the implications of which are unsettling. First Aid knows the corruption ran deep on Cybertron, even before he was forged, but it never fails to make him feel vaguely ill when he thought he'd finally reached the worst of it and found more hiding behind the next turn.

His spark sinks as he reaches the end. "Nothing we have can damage it. Extreme blunt force trauma. Sufficiently powerful acid. Extreme heat. Explosives."

"We should go then," Vortex says, touching First Aid's shoulder. He doesn't sound scared, not exactly, not the way First Aid is, but there's a new undertone of urgency to his voice.

"I'm not leaving with this thing still intact," First Aid says, shaking his head in flat denial. "The next ship that picks up the distress beacon will get massacred as soon as they board."

"Sure," Vortex says quietly. He puts his hand under First Aid's elbow, beseeching. "So we set the engine to self-destruct and then go."

"The problem," First Aid says, taking a fortifying vent between, "is that the engine controller is offline. We'd have to go down and figure out what was wrong. And repair it, if it's a problem we can even fix."

The plan is already unfolding in his mind. He spreads out the map in his processes, hunting for a way down to engineering. It's half a hunch, but the engine failure couldn't have been in the cores themselves or the ship would be space dust.

"So we come back with a ship they can blast this thing into space dust," Vortex says, his blades fanned out above his shoulders in a twitchy, slightly urgent pattern.

"There's too much salvage here," First Aid says, turning to look up at him. His optics are a bright glow behind his visor. "The shortages are so severe — you don't know. You can't even comprehend without seeing how bad it is on Cybertron. Someone will try to board and kill it to save the supplies, and if it isn't Cybertronians, then it'll be someone looking to weaponize it."

"How do you know?" Vortex says, frowning down at First Aid. "You could show them the footage."

"Because it's what I'd have recommended before I was — before I found you," First Aid says, the words a confession and a self-recrimination all in one.

Vortex takes an unexpected step forward and puts his hand on First Aid's shoulder, sliding it up the side of his neck. He thumbs open First Aid's mask, stroking the manual catch until transforms away, and then kisses him, slow and thorough. First Aid leans into it, hand pawing over Vortex's side, not holding him, just touching. He breaks the kiss and leans against Vortex, brow to brow, taking in the steadying heat of Vortex's presence.

A horrible feeling of certainty bursts through First Aid.

First Aid pulls away and slots his filtration mask back into place, optics averted. He doesn't need to see Vortex to know the kind of look he's giving First Aid. "I'm going to blow up the ship. There's no way I'm letting this slag fall into the wrong hands."

It's a surprisingly difficult choice. He's never been the unreasonably self-sacrificing kind, but he's aware he's been one of the many walking dead for years now, a ghost haunting his own frame. Without Vortex to think of, he might have made the choice more easily and been less afraid of losing his own life in the process.

That probably deserves some reflection if they make it out of this alive.

"You're gonna say something incredibly stupid aren't you?" Vortex asks, looking narrowly down at him. "Something stupid thing like you want me to go back to the shuttle and leave without you? Slag that. I'm not letting that thing have you."

First Aid opens his mouth. Denial would be a lie and there's no time for unpacking the rest of Vortex's apparent decision to assign himself as First Aid's personal bodyguard, so he surrenders to the idea. If they're going to die, they'll die together. "Fine. Let's get moving. It'll go faster with both of us."

*

First Aid unlocks the secure elevator bank and keys in the security code that takes them to the central transit corridor. From there, it's a straight shot to the main entrance of engineering.

Vortex takes point once the elevator opens into the dark belly of the ship. They don't discuss what they're doing. It might not work. It's a long shot. That even if they get lucky enough that it works, they might encounter the sparkeater before they can get back to the shuttle.

As they go deeper into the core of the ship, the decay of the Acid Rain is more pronounced where corners were cut in the manufacturing process. The further away they go from the secure facilities, the worse it seems to be. Soft metal panels sag overhead, the deck littered with debris and dust. In some places the walls are entirely rusted through, parts of the passenger quarters open like the hive of some giant insect.

Vortex keeps precisely two meters ahead, stride even and matched to First Aid's plodding pace, alert and scanning for threats. It feels like having an armed escort during the war again, infantry falling in around medics working on the front lines. First Aid doesn't exactly feel safe — he doesn't know how anyone could, with some monster ready to spring out of the shadows at any time — but he brings up the rear dutifully, keeping close enough he could reach out and touch Vortex's back.

First Aid doesn't bother drawing his weapon. The thing is so resistant to energy slugs it'd probably be more effective to throw the actual blaster at it. He limps along with a hand holding his damaged plating in place so each jolting step doesn't induce a fresh, nauseating wave of agony in his transformation cog.

Fear makes everything seem sharper. His ventilations seem painfully loud to his audials, the sound of their footsteps clanking through the corridor like an invitation to leap down from some shadowy duct and devour them.

They pass out of the rust-riddled crew quarters without incident and back into sturdier sectors of the ship. First Aid's sense of imminent danger eases fractionally. At least they don't have to worry about falling through a hole in the deck and spearing themselves on a rusted out support strut.

Vortex pauses by an open door, listening.

After a moment, First Aid asks in a whisper, "Do you hear that?"

"Yes," Vortex says, twitching his blades. "It doesn't matter. It's not the sparkeater."

"How do you know?" First Aid asks, hand pressed against Vortex's chassis, feeling the subtle pulse of Vortex's spark beneath the sensitive sensors on his fingertips. It's strong, steady, even. "Auditory hallucinations? I can —"

"No time," Vortex interrupts. "You trust me, doc?" First Aid does. He nods. "Then come on. I can tell the difference. You'll know it when I can't."

His hand on First Aid's elbow is firm. It drops away once they're back in motion. First Aid watches him carefully, the angled twitch of his rotor blades, the tightness of his plating. Whatever he's hearing must be unpleasant. First Aid lets the moment slip away. If they survive this, he can spend the next week running diagnostics.

The darkness here is no less oppressive than in the other parts of the ship, a general gloominess interspersed by emergency lighting and the occasional door of some closed maintenance facility. The Acid Rain is almost a full kilometer from nose to tail and First Aid's injured frame feels every centimeter of it.

They find the upper entrance to the engine room completely blocked. First Aid registers the blast door is charred and the bulkheads are spackled with glittering particles of metal, shrapnel lodged in every surface. He raises his head, looking around, confused. The sparkeater didn't do this.

Vortex nudges a hunk of metal with his foot. It's fused to the grating.

"Somebody had a bad day," Vortex says, scanning the door and the empty security booth. Shards of acrylic litter the interior, blown inward by force, and the electronics inside are completely slagged.

First Aid frowns at the damage, casting his spotlight around. "Some sort of bomb?"

Vortex touches one of the blackened marks on the wall. His fingers come away tacky with a tar-like substance. "Plasma grenade in a confined space. Maybe more than one." He licks the tip of one sticky digit and then holds his claws out for First Aid to see. "You're looking at an unlucky Cybertronian melted into the bulkhead. Looks like whoever pulled the pin probably bit the dust at this range."

First Aid can't help but shudder. The heat and energy required to blast living sentio metallico into component elements must be on par with the decommissioned smelters at Grindcore. It's a memory he'd rather not have.

"Let's go." First Aid puts his hand on Vortex's elbow, drawing him away from the carnage with an uneasy feeling settling in his lines. "This way's no good."

Vortex reroutes them through the adjacent maintenance and storage facilities and First Aid follows. Somewhere in transit, the burning in his lines has become a dull ache everywhere, a strange throbbing that makes his fluid pressure readings dip and surge. He checks his filtration status and finds it struggling sluggishly, but still working, so he doesn't think it'd be anything but a waste of time calling for another stop.

The maintenance access is undamaged, so they descend to the underbelly of the Acid Rain via gently sloping ramps wide enough to admit two ground transport mechs in alt mode. First Aid trails behind Vortex a few steps, hand on the wall. Energon drips from his open chassis, leaving lurid wet spatters on the well-worn metal.

An enormous double cargo door greets them at the bottom of the ramp, too heavy to open by hand. First Aid stands in front of it for a moment, one hand fisted over the exposed edge of his t-cog, and then fumbles open the small hatch housing the door controls with the other.

Vortex glances at him, claws draped over his rifle, and nods.

First Aid swipes his hand across the door controls and they open slowly, revealing the vast cavern of ship mechanics.

The engine room spans six full levels on the ship's map, narrow maintenance walkways surrounding the massive sublight generator. The outer reactor casing is so large it curves upwards and out of view into the darkness. Bundles of electrical cabling each the height of a mech sprout out of the ends, disappearing into gargantuan conduits supplying power to the Acid Rain's dual propulsion drives.

They enter cautiously, but the facility is empty. All the surviving lights are on here, powered on a separate circuit. Around the lower rim, other doors, all closed, lead to alternate exits, parts storage, and engineering facilities. The room feels like a time capsule, a thick layer of dust over the control panels and burnt out displays, so heavy the air is fogged with particulates.

First Aid puts his hand on Vortex's shoulder and Vortex allows him to take the lead as they make their way towards the stations near the fore of the engine. What he's looking for is up one level, on a wide grated platform, the narrow stairs leading up to it tilting ominously to one side. First Aid ascends cautiously, skipping loose steps, and Vortex comes close behind. It holds up under their weight, despite the rattling.

Someone's trashed the wiring in the bank of engine panels, a mess of severed cabling spilling from the thick metal housing. First Aid touches the controls and gets nothing in return.

"I think I can fix this," First Aid says, pulling a bundle of wires out. The damage is extensive, but sloppily done and he can splice enough of it together to get the interface working again. "It's going to take a few minutes."

"How's this work?" Vortex asks, looking sideways at First Aid. "We blow that thing and take the sparkeater out with us?"

First Aid shoots him an incredulous look. "I'm not actually planning on dying. If I can get the engine and the controls back online, we can blow it from my shuttle once we're a safe distance away."

Vortex looks up at the engine doubtfully. "You know how to fix one of these things?"

"With any luck, I won't have to," First Aid says. "There's a problem with the connection between the engine and the rest of the ship. The more I see, the more it looks like some kind of sabotage."

Vortex's optics shift briefly to First Aid and then return to scanning for threats. He resettles the stock of his rifle across his hip, looking all the world like a highly trained military operative, pure professional composure. "You think someone set this thing loose on purpose?"

"You said it yourself. This kind of thing would be invaluable to the right interested parties. I think it's a possibility someone was trying to steal the weapons technology and failed," First Aid says. "For our sake, I hope that's all that happened. My best guess is they needed to slow the crew down and left the sparkeater could do the dirty work of eliminating witnesses before the Acid Rain could get back into Cybertronian comms range."

"Right," Vortex says in tones of someone who's suddenly operating with intel far above his pay grade. First Aid knows the feeling. "What do you need me to do?"

"Watch my back while I work on the control panel," First Aid says. He doesn't have a clear way to tap into the security feeds here and there are dozens of places the sparkeater could hide in a place like this. "I need to fix this mess."

Without further instruction, Vortex hooks a hand on the ladder leading up to the next level. He starts swinging himself up, moving faster than First Aid expects for a mech his size. He pauses a dozen meters into the ascent to look back down at First Aid and say, "Don't blow anything up without me," before briefly disappearing out of sight.

First Aid tenses, waiting, but Vortex reappears a moment later at the edge of the walkway directly above him. He sketches a lazy all's well gesture in First Aid's direction, then drops down on one knee, swinging the blaster rifle over up with a practiced ease.

Lookout posted, First Aid supposes. He pulls out a circuit tester, a small wire stripper, and begins to disentangle the mess of wires. There are dozens and dozens to get through and there's no telling how much time they have before the sparkeater decides to show up again.

The first connection always takes the longest to work out, but once he has it, he picks up speed. Strip, twist, cap them off. It doesn't need to be pretty, it just needs to work long enough for him to get the job done. He splices the first pair together, then the next, black to black, red to red, working as quickly as he can.

Every small sound makes him tense. At the edge of his audial range, he can hear Vortex moving around and uses that to fix himself in time. One minute passes, then five, then ten. His fingers fly over the console. Sparks spit beneath them, but he doesn't flinch back, reaching deeper for the damaged power cabling. He has to replace these, so he yanks them out by the connector and hunts for spares in the adjacent equipment panels.

Triumphantly, First Aid closes his hand around an intact cord and extracts it from an electrical bank.

Lights wink out above him. Slag. He gropes for his spotlight with his other hand.

There's a scrape of metal on metal and First Aid looks up in alarm, scanning desperately for any sign of either Vortex or the sparkeater. There's nothing there when he looks except the occasional flicker of the overhead lights, bathing the walkway in a harsh white glow.

The walkway rattles, behind him this time, and he spins to face the source of the sound.

First Aid takes a single step back. Above him, Vortex shouts, but the glyphs are swallowed up by the roar of the sparkeater charging First Aid.

The sparkeater's on top of First Aid in less than a second, tentacles whipping around it in a disorienting display. He collides with the engine housing behind him, stumbling, and puts his hands out to break his fall.

First Aid doesn't hit the ground. The sparkeater's hand pushes inside the hole in his plating, face peeling back. It jams the limb upwards in the hunt for his spark chamber, widening the opening and crushing First Aid's already burning transformation cog in a blinding wave of agony.

He rips at it, frantic. The sparkeater hisses from all its exhaust points, emitting gouts of steam, its terrible jaws flaring open, ready to strike. Vortex drops straight down from his perch above, his weight rattling the entire structure and darts forward. The sparkeater turns its head to face him. Maybe First Aid is imagining its surprise, but the wild flailing of its tentacles as it tries to withdraw suggests it didn't expect to be outnumbered.

First Aid braces his shoulders against the metal, seizes the sparkeater by the shoulders, and shoves as hard as he can. It reels backwards, hissing like a steam exhaust, gangly limbs splayed for balance. He clamps down on the urge to purge his fuel tanks, his lines burning. Whatever it might have damaged on the way into First Aid's frame, it did twice over on extraction.

The sparkeater's surprise doesn't last long — the sparkeater rights itself, twisting, and drops down on all fours, scuttling sideways in an unnerving tangle of limbs and exposed wiring. First Aid raises his blaster and aims for it, but it darts out of the way as he pulls the trigger and his targeting system is too sluggish for him to keep a bead on it.

"Get down." Vortex steps between him and the sparkeater without hesitating, rifle raised, and fires. Again and again. He advances inexorably, the flash of the muzzle like lightning in the cavernous space, the slug casings rattling on the grated walkway as Vortex discharges the entire clip into the sparkeater and reloads.

It recoils from him but doesn't retreat, flinching each time the heavy slugs pelt its bare frame. First Aid backs towards the engine controls, limping, and fumbles for the front panel.

A muffled clicking comes from the blaster, the tip smelter-red and glowing. The sparkeater rears, tentacles spread. Vortex's blades fan out as he hisses, flinging the depleted blaster onto the grating.

The sparkeater darts forward, not for Vortex, but towards First Aid.

Like it's playing out in slow motion, First Aid sees what's about to happen: Vortex coils, ready to spring, his plating shifting and his blades angling upward. He looks like a mechanimal about to pounce. Vortex is twenty five tons of weaponry, purpose built for killing, aimed at a hostile target.

"Vortex," First Aid says, his vocal synthesizer emitting a burst of frustrated static, "don't."

Vortex growls — a low, furious, feral turbine sound — and leaps.

First Aid staggers forward too late, hand outstretched, but Vortex collides with the sparkeater center mass like a missile fired with precision accuracy. Vortex's claws dig into the sparkeater's mechanics, the force of his impact and his weight sending it stumbling backwards, off balance. First Aid's not sure which one of them makes the distorted sound of rage that rips through the air.

The two of them disappear over the side in a furious tangle of limbs, leaving First Aid alone with a freshly gaping hole in his side and the busted engine control panel.

Chapter Text

First Aid stumbles forward, vocal synthesizer glitching so badly he can't cry out. The world tilts as he briefly loses hydraulic pressure in his right leg, toppling to his hands and knees, a smell like burning plastic insinuating itself into his olfactory sensors. The repeat impact to his t-cog sends a burst of agony through his entire lower half, a sickening, throbbing sensation.

A horrible noise rises all around him, the sound of Vortex’s snarling rotor in the cavernous space a guttering, syncopated roar against the backdrop of the ship's mechanics. The sparkeater is screeching, a thin, sharp, grating sound.

He reaches into his own chassis and numbly ties off one dripping line after the other. The repair isn't stable, but it'll have to hold for now.

Vortex is on his own for now. First Aid needs to get back to the engine controls, install the power cable, and start the manual ignition sequence.

First Aid is upright and staggering forward without knowing entirely how he got to his feet. The last blow to his busted t-cog leaves him reeling and disoriented. He feels like he’s taken one too many boosters and is on his way to a bad trip, optical input blurry and dark around the edges.

Another piercing yowl rises from below, so distorted First Aid can't tell if it's Vortex or the sparkeater.

He leans against the railing and swings his head from side to side, trying to catch a glimpse of Vortex. For a moment he thinks he sees a flash of teal in the darkness, but Vortex has already flung himself down another level, the sparkeater in pursuit.

Vortex is buying First Aid the time he needs to complete the repairs. The least First Aid could do is work quickly.

Once he's back at the console, the power cord fits. He tamps down on the surge of triumph. He can't get sloppy now.

First Aid shoves a data cable into one of the open data jacks and flinches at the burst of sparking feedback. The screens light up, displaying a progress bar moving far too slow for First Aid's liking. There's nothing he can do to speed it up from where he is — a hardline data connection isn't accessible until the slagging thing finishes its startup sequence.

Boot sequence finished, a data feed full of thousands of error reports springs to the forefront of his HUD and he swallows his shout.

Three burnt out fuel cores need to be swapped. He passes his hand over the controls uselessly, dismayed. There's no access here; all fuel core maintenance is done from a secure chamber near the top of the engine room.

He slams his fist on the console and then clamps down on the boiling frustration so tightly his emotional processor throws a critical error.

A loud crash below brings him back to reality. He's in motion, dashing towards the ladder before he can think twice, focus sharpened even as his optical input pixelates with the effort needed to keep him upright.

The Acid Rain's engine is First Aid's real battle. He has to trust Vortex will survive.

He grips the highest rung of the ladder his damaged t-cog will allow him to reach. With a clumsy haste that's verging on agonizing, he hauls himself upwards towards the power conduits. The spare cores can be swapped in for the damaged ones with the aid of the massive mechanical gimbals flanking the housing, but he needs to get to the control booth two levels up to initiate the sequence. He flinches at the clangor of metal impacting metal, swiftly followed by the almost deafening clatter of a section of grating being upended. A thin sound rips through the air moments later: the sparkeater, wailing. Grimly, First Aid can only be satisfied Vortex is proving to be a much more difficult meal. One painful meter at a time, First Aid climbs. There's no turning back now. If either of them fail, they're condemning whoever comes along to the same fate. He crests the upper catwalk, hooking one elbow and then the other over the grating and levering himself up. His optical input darkens at the peripheral, the colors desaturated. An alert for his fluid pressure cuts through his internal monitoring. He reaches down and touches his plating and his hand comes away coated in fresh energon.

Slag. He must have popped a line. First Aid waits one second, two, three, his ventilations kicking up the heavy layer of dust settled over this part of the catwalk. The distortion recedes. He climbs to his feet, moving cautiously. The metal structure here isn't fully stable, the joints creaking with age. He'll be no help at all to Vortex if he loses his balance and pitches headlong over the railing or — worse — collapses the entire structure.

He makes it up the final quarter flight of stairs into the control room and finds the console intact. First Aid has never been the praying sort, but he feels an intense, cosmic sort of relief to find the screens wake easily when he powers them on.

First Aid inputs the security code from the guard station. It spits out a blunt, bold Access Denied message.

He tries again with another code.

Error: Enter security fob.

Frag. Some of the old Functionist security systems require a physical identity chip to bypass. He doesn't have a module for that and he definitely doesn't have any easy way to spoof one.

A low boom from below makes him flinch, and then he remembers: the data pad. That would have the correct credentials built in. He fumbles for his subspace and retrieves it.

The screen is cracked, the connector port slagged. First Aid manages to negotiate a flat-edged probe into the seam along the edge and pop it open. Components spill out of the housing in a shower of plastic and glass. He shakes it out and spots the memory module — still fully intact, no signs of heat damage, no visible cracks — mounted to the underside of the main circuit board.

First Aid works as quickly as his damaged frame allows, disassembling the data pad on the console. One thing at a time. First Aid can handle one thing at a time. He needs to socket the module into one of his own ports and set up a pass-through interface between the module and the ship's console.

If he doesn't break it. First Aid suppresses his ventilations, stilling his entire frame, and when the trembling in his hand subsides, pops the memory module off its mount. It comes away in one piece. He holds it up to the dim emergency light, turning it over — once, twice, thrice — to confirm, and then slots it rapidly into himself.

The module connects immediately. Some of the data sectors are corrupted, the ad hoc interface more like touching a live wire with his bare hands, unpleasant, tingling. The memory module heats as he begins data transfer.

The authentication request disappears from the screen. He's in. He slumps against the console in relief as the fuel core maintenance profile loads.

First Aid's luck doesn't hold out long. The foremost gimbal responsible for resetting the fuel rod chambers is unresponsive, the entire assembly burnt out and displaying a grim NO SIGNAL error on the monitor. He can access the fuel rods by using the emergency pressure release and replace them with the main arm, but he won't be able to close the chambers again. Someone will have to manually climb up and lock the hatches back into place so the whole thing doesn't blow the second First Aid engages the catalyzer.

They'll have to find a way to get up there once he loads the cores.

A rough scrape of metal on metal catches his attention. He looks up to find Vortex crawling up over the railing, blades flattened against his back, covered in spatters of energon. The sparkeater is nowhere in sight. Relief floods him.

"Where is it?" First Aid glances over his shoulder. As happy as he is to see Vortex, it'd be too much to hope that the fragging thing is dead or chased off permanently.

"Don't know," Vortex says, his rotors sharpened into an overlapping cluster, a single point of twitching rage. "It slithered into a maintenance tunnel. I wasn't going to chase it."

Vortex is wounded in at least a dozen places that First Aid can see, plating punctured and sparks popping in the gaps, a bad sign. He squats beside First Aid like a gargoyle and licks his lips, hunched with his fangs bared, quivering and vicious. He wipes sheeting energon off the left side of his visor with the back of his hand, his sneer deepening at the sight of his own energon.

"You need to clamp that off," First Aid says, not daring to take his hands off the controls for even a second.

"I’ll be fine," Vortex says, flexing his gore-covered claws open and closed. It looks like he might have scored a few points on the sparkeater from the greenish sheen to his dark hands. He shakes all over like a scraphound and spatters energon and oil on the grating. "How long until we're ready to go?"

"Maybe two minutes for this part," First Aid says, completing the transfer sequence for the first core. It hisses when it connects, offgassing acrid fumes. "And then I’ll need to climb up top. The arm's busted, so I have to manually close everything."

"I can do it. Show me," Vortex says and sticks out his wrist, exposing a data jack.

"My side panel," First Aid says, palming it open quickly, offering the undamaged port above his hip.

Vortex shifts close, the smell of slagged circuitry evident through First Aid’s cracked filtration mask. First Aid stiffens involuntarily when Vortex plugs in, hastily throwing up a barrier against the wave of unfiltered agony that temporarily threatens to swamp him, Vortex's pain undiluted. The only anchoring point is that beneath it all is a brazen fearlessness and an untethered, almost violent satisfaction at having shielded First Aid.

Vortex’s presence is like a shadow in his processes, a jangle of emotion and hungers that First Aid can barely even parse, much less fathom. He thrusts the data packet down the line to Vortex before he can get pulled under by trying to parse out the tangle of emotional bleedthrough.

He throws Vortex out of the interface with a blast of sorry/not right now/yes later alongside the eject command. Vortex paws at First Aid’s hip and scrapes his mouth across First Aid’s audial with a rumbling buzz of his turbine and then is gone nearly the same second, hauling himself hand over hand up the side of the engine cage towards the apex.

In a moment of angry consternation, First Aid thinks he’s going to be really slagged off if he dies without getting to explore that further.

He ducks his head and gets back to work, glancing once over his shoulder to be sure the coast is clear.

The second core locks into the socket without issue and he works his way steadily through the final sequence, a tense feeling building between his shoulders and all down his spinal strut. He slams punches in the location and access codes one after another until the light turns green, then primes the engine. The only thing left to do is engage the ignition and he can’t do that until Vortex is finished with his portion of the repairs.

A slithering sound behind him makes his spark drop.

He turns in time to see it cresting the top of the stairs up to the control booth, crouched on hands and splayed knees, thick-cabled tentacles fanned out around it in an intense, waving arc. Vortex damaged it — one arm hangs limp at the elbow, sparking as it drags along the grating — so it isn't invincible, but the amount of carnage it managed in the trade strongly suggests to First Aid he's pretty fragged if he has to fight it.

First Aid has basic combat training and that's probably the only thing that saves him as it lunges at him. He throws himself out of the way, reaching for his blaster, and peppers it with energy fire. The rounds fizzle on the outer armor, but Vortex landed a few good hits on it with his claws and it hisses poisonously when he clips the wounds.

If First Aid was a better shot, that might give him some hope.

It doesn't take long for the sparkeater to recover, wheeling on First Aid with a sharp, scraping sound from its vocal synthesizer, like metal dragging across metal. He scrambles to his feet and dashes back towards the way it came at him, leaping straight past the stairs and onto the narrow landing below. The metal grating rattles ominously beneath his weight and he teeters forward, only barely managing to stay upright as his momentum carries him a little too far.

The unsecured side of the catwalk collapses and he flings himself forward onto the next stable section, narrowly landing on the edge. He wobbles and goes down on one knee, hand over his t-cog. When he looks up to see where the sparkeater is, it's looking at the gap between them, head tilted, optics spiraled down to dull pinpricks. The sparkeater emits a string of distorted beeps in First Aid's direction and straightens, standing upright almost like a mech.

First Aid scrambles to his feet and takes slow steps backwards, putting some distance between himself and the sparkeater. The rest of the catwalk is unsteady under his weight, but if he can manage to get to the end of the platform, the access ladder is anchored to the levels above and below.

The sparkeater has other plans.

First Aid can only watch in dismay as it crouches, stretching one tentacle after another forward, then uses them to lever its bulk across the gap in one tidy, swift motion.

He reels backwards towards the lip of the deck as it advances. There's no railing directly behind him, this part of the structure partially collapsed. The sparkeater trills, an eerily soft sound, and he feels a terrible clenching pass through his whole body, an involuntary wave of bitter, agonizing charge as his spark flares in response. Power sizzles through his lines, burning, and he clenches his tongue so tightly between his teeth he tastes his own energon before the sensors pop and short.

His limbs feel strangely heavy and he reaches up and claws at his chest plating without wanting to. The sound it makes, the frequency, makes him want to reach in and pry his own spark chamber open, if only for the relief of the pain being gone.

For the first time in millennia, First Aid experiences a significant emotional reaction to the thought of dying. It floods him, surging fuel and coolant and activating dormant threat detection protocols long-dulled by an omnipresent threat too big and suffocating for his processor to comprehend. It's not so incomprehensible now; the sparkeater is real and trying to eat him alive.

They collide while First Aid struggles against the bombardment of spark chamber access requests. The sparkeater's weight should send him over the edge, but he only teeters on the brink. His first thought is that it must be holding him, but then the pain begins to filter through the shock, a sick feeling so intense his optical input glitches.

He looks down. A rope-like bundle of tentacles sprouts from his abdominal plating, slick with fresh energon. Dripping with First Aid's vital fluids.

First Aid reaches down and touches the sharp edges of the metal, disbelieving. The sparkeater snarls, pushing him backwards, and he can only skid and stumble, unable to get a grip on anything except the impaling limbs.

The appendages spread, prying him apart from the inside. He can feel his cabling sparking, a burning sensation rippling through his sensory network. There's an intense pressure followed by a horrible sound he can't parse. A component deep inside him gives, punctured or shattered.

First Aid's back hits the railing with jarring force. The metal creaks under their combined weight. The sparkeater's maw flares open, fingers on First Aid's chest plating, prying at the transformation seams. He can feel a physical tug in his spark now, like it's trying to escape his spark chamber of its own volition, and he shoves at the sparkeater, trying to get away, desperate to make it stop.

It happens again, like a yank in his processor. No — no, no —

He closes his hand around the tentacles shoved into his chassis and squeezes, crushing the plating together with a hideous crunch of crumpling metal. The sparkeater yowls and shoves at him, now fighting to disentangle itself. The hooked tips of its tentacles catch on his internal mechanics, doing even more damage on the way out.

The impulse to open his spark chamber dissipates, leaving an ache behind. His ventilations are labored, his cooling systems failing.

First Aid gives a cry as the sparkeater finally wrenches itself free and shoves him backwards.

The railing holds him, but only barely, bent under the weight of his frame. He grips at the bar, trapped between a sharp drop and certain death.

Metal groans, protesting. Then, all at once, it snaps. He reaches for something — anything — to hold onto.

His fingers close on empty air.

First Aid wheels backwards, fuel tank lurching, his gyroscope shrieking over impending impact warnings. The last thing he sees before he hits the deck is the sparkeater retreating from the edge.

*

Hand pressed flat over the gaping hole in his abdominal plating, the only thing that First Aid thinks of is Ambulon. Not all the long hours agonizing over whether or not First Aid could have ever saved him, or about all the wrongdoings and hurts both preceding it and then coming swiftly after. Not even the waking nightmare of the way the blaster had felt in his hand when he pulled the trigger right in Pharma’s laughing, sneering face.

First Aid’s first night on Delphi, Ambulon gave him the grand tour even though he'd only been there himself for a few days, then cracked open two cubes for them. He leaned against a counter, laughing at something one of the nurses said. First Aid hadn't enjoyed the assignment — and subsequent demotion — but with Ambulon there, he'd been warmed by the idea of being somewhere he could do some good.

Once the first memory surfaces, the others come quickly: patient rounds, bad jokes over an operating table, sleeping cramped next to one another on the on call berth with a constantly fading patient in the next room —

— the unfinished game of Fullstasis sitting for years in First Aid's primary memory, still waiting for Ambulon's next move. Hundreds of saved messages, none of them about anything more important than work, or supplies, or getting a cube together sometime after the war —

He draws in agonized ventilations and swallows hard around the knot of grief. First Aid still doesn't quite understand the depth of his own mourning, the abject misery of it. The only two things they ever seemed to have in common were their profession and the fact they were often huddled under the same rock in the same unending storm.

Ambulon had been his friend anyway. Maybe that was enough. Maybe that was the only thing that'd ever mattered. First Aid's always found it difficult to connect. For a long time after Ambulon died, it felt his spark lay down in the grave right next to Ambulon. It hung heavy over him. It still hangs heavy.

First Aid used to wish it'd been him that died instead of Ambulon. Not because he ever really wanted things to end for him, it seemed unfamiliar that First Aid survived when he'd had known a life before the war and Ambulon hadn't. That at least First Aid had lived without constant fear, however briefly.

At some point, though, First Aid had begun to wonder if Ambulon wasn’t spared the worst of it, a guilty oscillation between grief and relief. At least Ambulon never had to try to salvage the shell of a life out of the hopeless wreckage of their planet. It's the one thing First Aid could never reconcile after Megatron stepped down and traded in dictatorship for his grim, tireless penance.

Coming back to a planet so utterly unrecognizable and choked by suffering was the same as watching someone dying right beneath First Aid's hands. Mechs made for peace forced to fight a war replaced by mechs made for war trying vainly to rebuild the memory of something that keeps slipping through their hands.

First Aid can't save everyone. He can't even save himself.

Through the swirl of steam he catches a glimpse of Vortex’s shadow moving far above. His vocal synthesizer glitches when he tries to call out. He doesn’t even know if Vortex will be able to find him once he gets the engine working.

The sparkeater didn't follow him down. He wonders distantly if it’s crawled off into some hole to regroup, or if it understands on some level what Vortex is attempting to do. It has some kind of intelligence, monstrous and devouring as it is.

His fluid pressure drops again. An alert pops up, noting critical levels of hydraulic pressure. It shakes First Aid out of his miserable daze.

Ambulon's dead but First Aid isn't. Not yet. He's not going to give up now. Not now. Not yet.

He reaches into his chassis and fumbles for his severed fuel lines. The slurry of oil and energon makes the task harder and he has to seize his own tubing forcibly. There are clamps in his subspace. He manages to get the correct compartment open and close his fingers around one of them, pinching off the flow with his other hand.

His elbow joint temporarily loses primary power as a chain of fuses blow one by one up his forearm. The clamp clatters to the floor as his grip grows clumsy and stiff while the actuator reroutes to secondary power. Energon gushes over his palm. He makes a soft sound, a ragged sob of frustration, groping for the tiny ring of metal once the feeling comes back to his fingertips sensors.

Everything is pushed so far out of place he can't feel his fuel main anymore. His internals are shredded beyond his monitoring capabilities, so he grips blindly at anything he can to staunch the hemorrhage.

First Aid runs out of supplies before he runs out of severed lines. A cable sparks inside him. Power flickers internally. If Vortex doesn't find him quickly and get him back to shuttle, this will be where he dies.

The automated message will fire off towards Cybertron. They'll come for him: he's too valuable to leave stranded, his experience too important. Someone will demand it, Ratchet probably. They'll come for him and most likely also die to the sparkeater.

First Aid closes his optics, surrendering a few precious seconds to the immediate agony of his frame. It's easier to suffer than to consider he may have doomed others to die here with him.

And Vortex —

A weight rattles the deck, dropping down from somewhere above. First Aid doesn’t bother opening his optics. The sharp smell of polluted energon batters his olfactory sensors, undertones of burning rubber and slagged metal.

"Don’t die on me now," Vortex says, dropping to his knees next to First Aid, who blinks alert at the sound of his voice. "We were just getting to know each other."

"You found me," First Aid says, reaching for Vortex. His hand lands on one broad shoulder and slides off weakly. "I’m pretty fragged up. Don't think I can walk."

"No problem," Vortex says, his optics fixed on the hole in First Aid’s plating. He reaches out and touches it, running his clawtip almost curiously around the edge. "I’ve carried heavier cargo."

"It’s faster if you go without me," First Aid says, looking up into the gloom above with a kind of grim resignation. Odds are Vortex's injuries aren't critical enough to kill him before he can make it back to Cybertron, even without First Aid's help.

"Sure," Vortex says, then reaches down and heaves First Aid into his arms. It takes a couple of jostling attempts, but he gets First Aid off the ground and propped upright against him. "Safer is boring. ‘Sides, I wanna put my hand inside your chassis later and suck you off."

First Aid laughs abruptly at the absurdity of it, then winces as pain shoots up his spinal strut. That can't be a sign of anything good. "That’s disgusting."

"Yeah. You said you saw my record," Vortex flashes a grin at him. "You gonna let me do it?"

First Aid reaches up and smears energon across Vortex's cheek, an incredible, fond feeling lodging beneath his spark. He recognizes it now as genuine affection — and behind it, the fear of dying before he can do anything more than get a glimpse of it. "I’ll think about it."

"Take a step for me?" Vortex keeps an arm around his waist holding most of First Aid's weight.

The effort to remain upright is too much for his damaged frame. The actuators in his knees giving out, the hydraulics collapsing on themselves, his fluid pressure too insubstantial to keep him upright even with Vortex's help.

"Don't think I can." First Aid clutches at Vortex's side. Even his grip feels weak. "Did you get the hatches closed?"

"Yeah, don't worry about that." Vortex pulls him back to his feet as First Aid begins to sag again. "I need to get you out of here."

"Can't, not yet. I have to get to a ship interface," First Aid says, clutching Vortex for support. "I need to make sure the connection is working so I can blow it from the shuttle."

"This way." Vortex slings First Aid's arm over the broad span of his shoulders, holding him up with an arm around his waist. Vortex is strong. First Aid needs strength now more than he ever has.

First Aid glances over his shoulder at the engine. The dark curve of it is still inert. The sparkeater is nowhere to be found at the moment. Whatever damage they did to it, it retreated.

He doubts that'll be permanent.

First Aid isn't sure they'll survive another round. Even with the knowledge that they can injure it, the odds aren't in their favor. First Aid can't see a way to disable or slow it enough that they could find a way to finish the job without dying themselves.

He puts a hand over his abdominal plating, feeling the drip drip drip of his fuel leaking out. He doesn't say anything to Vortex about it. There's no time to waste. The shuttle is their best hope.

The engine room is attached to a set of monitoring substations for the ship. Empty rooms filled with empty workstations, where engineers would've spent their days hooked up, idling over monitoring systems, supervising. Functionists only trusted unsparked computational technology so far — the Acid Rain would've been helmed by pilots with advanced navigational abilities and staffed by data class officers to handle each one of the systems with no need for the automation that became common during the war.

Old, closed-loop computers like this are easy to jump into. The software actively looks for a connection and expects anyone with cable access to already be authorized. The biggest barrier to entry for intruders is the guards posted at checkpoints and security cameras — and with the crew dead, First Aid should have free reign.

And a collection of a dozen spoofed security profiles even if he doesn't.

First Aid leans on the workstation and gropes for the connector. Vortex has to help him, snapping the cable into place, and holds him up, his hand smeared with energon.

The handshake protocol is only a token barrier. He bombards the password query with the scraped ident codes until one finally breaks through.

His pain drops into the background as he extends into the Acid Rain.

First Aid can feel a strange weightlessness to himself, an expansion of his processes into space a hundred times more powerful than his own. Little wonder the engineers preferred this — even without sensory input and the Acid Rain's aging, damaged hardware, the sensation of sprawling out into a space larger than himself feels like sinking into hot oil compared to the limitations and pains of his own frame.

The Acid Rain's engine control spreads out in front of him. First Aid isn't a pilot, or an engineer, or a ship's mechanic. He doesn't know much about heavy industrial equipment, unsparked computers. His fingers smear energon on the manual controls as he works through the directory on the databases, hunting for some scrap of data on the ignition sequence.

"Frag, got it," he gasps, initializing the file. He seizes it, dragging it haphazardly into his own memory, and folds the whole thing open at once without bothering to safely boot it behind a partition.

Eleven steps, manual input only, no room for accidental ignition. He punches in the sequence one command at a time, confirming each step as it queries his input. His hands fly, slipping on the slick keys. His own energon smeared across them complicates matters; these consoles weren't meant to be used by the injured and fading.

Moment of truth. Either the engine will start or they'll be blown to atoms. His hand hovers over the final glyph. "It might not work."

"If this is it," Vortex says, confessional, pressing his brow between First Aid's shoulders, "glad it was you that found me."

His spark constricts. First Aid turns his head and spits energon onto the grating, then presses the final key. He can hear the engine hum to life, a low drone that seems to fill the entire ship.

First Aid sags in Vortex's arms. Reality filters back in as he starts to decouple from each part of the ship: Pain, the damp, the chill, Vortex's hands on him, Vortex saying something incomprehensible, tone worried. His fuel pump is pounding. It worked. It worked. He opens his mouth to say that they did it —

Feedback washes up the cable, intense system noise, tidal wave of a four million year old ship with no logic, intellect, or independent judgment trying to boot every single offline system all at once. And First Aid's connected to it, unsecured, no firewalls. The ship latches on to him and his limbs spasm as he briefly becomes an extension of the Acid Rain's hardware. He rips the line out too late to stop the damage.

There's a fizzing noise. Pain. The smell of smoke and slagged circuitry. The telltale buzz of overloaded cabling swells up from the base of his spinal strut and fuses blow. He loses sensory input from his extremities.

"Slag," Vortex says, the first clear words First Aid registers. He jostles First Aid. "Am I losing you?"

First Aid doesn't have time to answer. The last thing he's aware of is Vortex catching him as he falls.

*

First Aid's never actually put his durability to the test. For a while all he can feel is his own electricity, a complete darkness and cradling absence of external input. He's alive, a twinkle in the stillness of his own frame. In the quiet, he starts to feel his fluid systems doing their best to reroute. Damaged connections cull themselves and reform where bridges can be found between functioning hardware and his processor.

A hard boot from temporary stasis takes a long time. Awareness returns to him in bits and pieces. His internal monitoring throws up clusters of errors that he can only dismiss without reading, working quickly as they crop up. The queue bloats. He can feel each individual process as it lags, bogged down by centuries of accreted anxieties and resentment piled on top of one another, the sticky cling of emotions backlogged and flagged for processing indefinitely later.

Vortex rises to the top, cutting through the noise. First Aid can smell him everywhere, warm oil and the waxed scent of his seams. His fingers flex, making contact with living metal.

First Aid comes around to his head lolling against Vortex’s chest. His relationship with consciousness is tenuous at best. One of his optics flickers in and out, making the corridor swim as the other blurs and refocuses to compensate. He's not registering anything in his audio processing centers. That's still offline, deprioritized.

Vortex’s footsteps are steady, not panicked — measured. He's holding First Aid against him, moving quickly, his long stride eating up the meters.

They pass through total darkness a few times, the only thing in First Aid’s view the luminous red of Vortex's tac visor, brightening when he glances down at First Aid. He has some hazy impression that Vortex keeps checking over his shoulder and that the uneven hitch in Vortex's gait is growing more pronounced the longer they walk.

First Aid tries to measure their passage by counting the lights, but most of them are missing. He tries to pace out Vortex’s steps, but his movements are irregular, shuffling, pausing, sometimes darting forward, and First Aid’s almost certain he’s losing time.

Vortex stops. They’re not on the ship — his ship? — their ship? First Aid rises from a strange blank spot in his memory, half-delirious, to gaze up at him, at the severe angle of Vortex's downturned face. Vortex puts him down on the deck, propping First Aid against the bulkhead. He’s saying something, but First Aid can only feel the sound of it, not make out the shape of the words.

First Aid's emotional processing onlines itself before the rest of his complex cognitive processes. The parts of First Aid that died and were buried during the war would be horrified to be held like this by a killer. He would've condemned Vortex as savage, undesirable, irredeemable.

All he feels now is a relief that smothers his fear. Gratitude. Affection.

With a shaky hand he reaches up and hooks his fingers over Vortex's collar, as if he could somehow claw back all the years lost to his own hopeless naivety. Maybe if he'd known more, seen more sooner, he could've avoided being swept along forever in a war he didn't want to fight.

"I killed him," First Aid says, thinking of Pharma with an immense, horrible pity and resentment. It didn’t bring Ambulon back. It didn't make anything feel any better. He can still feel the recoil from the blaster, the way the energon spattered on his face, on his neck. How he washed it out of his seams and tried scrubbing the lingering feeling out of his plating for days and days, until he felt raw with more than grief.

His audial input connects. He flinches at the rasping sound of his own ventilations, his cooling system struggling.

"Killed who?" There’s a sharp pain in his side and First Aid can dimly feel a hand moving inside him, groping over components. Claws. He thinks of the sparkeater. He thinks of Pharma’s face, there and then gone, the worst thing he's ever done. "You can tell me."

"He killed Ambulon," First Aid says. His mouth floods with lubricant like he’s going to purge, but his tanks only give a vaguely queasy heave. He has the sense that maybe he shouldn’t be telling this to Vortex, that he should be asking more questions about what the strange pain in his abdominal plating is. "I killed him. I think I'd do it again."

"Yeah," Vortex says, glancing up at him. "Sounds like you did the right thing killing him back."

"Did I?" First Aid asks. He put Ambulon back together piece by piece. Ambulon’s corpse. Nothing could put Ambulon back together. He can still feel the dead metal beneath his fingertips. Feel it in his own processor, when the body that had once been Ambulon was part of him, too. Some piece of First Aid feels like it's slowly been dying ever since. Vortex shouldn’t know that. Vortex will put him down and leave instead of doing — what is he doing? His alarm clears away the fog in his processes. "Are you tying my lines?"

"You’re dripping everywhere," Vortex says. He caresses First Aid’s cheek, smearing energon around, then bends and kisses him, swallowing the sudden, sharp cry that First Aid makes when his hand twists inside First Aid’s abdominal cavity. A searing pain fills First Aid and then dissipates. "It's kinda hot, but I don't think it's good."

"Save that for later," First Aid mumbles raggedly against his cheek. Vortex licks the energon from First Aid's chin and another twist makes First Aid’s vision flicker around the edges.

Or the lights are failing — he’s not sure at this point, really.

He reaches for his medical protocols and snags them, pulling them forcibly back online. Things clear. He has space to think again, a few centimeters to cling to, the very edge of his processor back on familiar ground. "You're not doing it right."

"You're one of those annoying fraggers that's gotta do everything themselves even if you're actively dying, aren't you?" Vortex says and there's a sharp pain inside his abdominal cavity that suggests something shifting in a bad way. "Shut up and let me save you."

"Is it coming?" First Aid asks, subsiding to let Vortex work. He turns his head to the side and looks down the corridor. Everything is so dark.

"I can't hear it," Vortex says. He shifts First Aid around on the deck, then gives up and ducks down to peer inside First Aid, putting his other hand in alongside the first. It helps that his claws are slender, made for prying open armored plating. "Almost done. Pop your fuel port for me."

"What?" First Aid asks, trying to crane his neck to see what Vortex is doing.

"Just do it," Vortex says and before First Aid can ask why, he's clawing open his side panel, where his own fuel tank is. He uncoils a length of tubing and jams it into his own tank and sucks hard on the other end until energon wells up out of it, a splash of bright pink spillage dripping down his chin. "Open up, for me. I know you know how."

The tip of his claw presses hard into the edge of his fuel port. First Aid yelps at the stab of pain as Vortex gets beneath the panel and pries it open without waiting for First Aid to cooperate. He pushes weakly at Vortex's hand but doesn't have the strength to dislodge it. "That's not going to hold me over for very long unless you find the hemorrhage."

"Then we better get back to the ship fast before you drain us both dry," Vortex says and forces the fuel line down into First Aid's tanks. He plants his knee in First Aid's lap, seizes his face in one hand, and kisses him, mostly fang and scraping tongue.

First Aid takes it, mouth slack, his lines swelling greedily with fuel. The surge of energy brings him back up out of the clouded haze he's been drifting in. The taste of Vortex's energon on his mouth is sweet, a slippery mess that makes him feel hot and terrified and desperate to not die.

When Vortex retreats, First Aid asks, dazed, "Are you going to keep doing that every time I disagree with you?"

"As long as it keeps working," Vortex says with vicious good cheer and yanks the fuel line out of his tank, spilling energon everywhere like he doesn't give a frag. He licks his palm but the effort mostly smears the mess around even more. "Let me know when I need to escalate to sucking your spike. We ain't got that much time, but I'm flexible."

A distant, dragging scrape of metal on metal that echoes through the corridor, followed by a piercing screech, startles them both into motion. First Aid slams his fuel cover closed and Vortex hauls them both back to their feet. First Aid looks around, trying to get his bearings. He doesn't think they're that close to the shuttle, but he doesn't recognize the corridor from any of his planned routes.

He asks, "Which way are you taking us?"

"I got the maps with your credentials. There's a shortcut," Vortex says, all business, focused and efficient as he scans for danger. First Aid wonders what he might have been like if he'd lived through the war. "Level 3, corridor 16, the fore access point near the crew habs."

First Aid pulls it up on his internal systems and shakes his head. "That whole sector's blown out," First Aid counters. "No gravity. We won't be able to make the jump."

"I can make it across," Vortex says, blades bristling upright. "Don't have time to go the long way."

"You have time if you leave me," First Aid says, leaning heavily against Vortex. His left leg is still only questionably able to hold his weight and his entire right side's hydraulic integrity isn't even worth mentioning. Everything hurts.

"Sure," Vortex says, in a tone that suggests he's very much not going to do that. First Aid is, a little guiltily, grateful. "You can stop trying to die any time now."

"I'm not trying," First Aid says, letting his head fall to Vortex's shoulder. "Seems to keep happening.

"Let's get you back to the shuttle." Vortex tries to walk with him a few steps, but First Aid's leg drags and hitches. He takes a few steps, but he's slow. "Wait here. I'm going to see if there's anything left on the other side."

Vortex props him against the bulkhead and goes to peer through the blast door's tiny window. First Aid doesn't need to see to know what's going on; he can extrapolate the severity of the situation from Vortex's rumpled expression. Anything that took out that much of the hull took out everything behind it, too.

First Aid slides down and settles on the deck with a thump that rattles his plating. He puts a hand into the hole in his side and feels fresh dripping. There's nothing else he can do about it right now. Not until he gets to the med station in his shuttle.

"Whole sector's completely slagged. It's empty space, like something took a chunk out of the ship," Vortex reports, kneeling in front of First Aid. There's energon smeared all over his chassis, a gory wash down the front of his frame, but he only takes First Aid's arm in his hand and holds it. "Doesn't matter. Still the fastest route — I can do a jump."

"You'll need to plug in to access the blast door. I gave you the medical access codes," First Aid says, not gainsaying him. Vortex's plan is questionable, but it's better than First Aid's, which is to die in this corridor. He turns his arm in Vortex's grasp to grip his forearm in return. "It should override the emergency closure."

Vortex slips away from him. First Aid closes his optics and leans heavily against the metal. He can feel the vibration of the ship under his clenched fist.

A Cybertronian can survive several hours in vacuum with a sealed, functioning temperature regulation system and a properly fluid pressure. With his fuel lines exposed and a gaping hole in his plating, it's more like five minutes before the energon starts to fully crystallize. If they can't get back into the ship on the other side and seal it off, he'll be slagged.

If they can't get back to the shuttle, he's slagged either way.

He opens his optics again in time to watch Vortex pry the door open. First Aid flinches at the sudden, battering chill of open space, the cold like a knife in the internals, beyond painful. The atmosphere rushes out all in one go, the pressure change is so rapid it blows the last overhead emergency light as quickly as a flame being snuffed. Darkness settles over them, the cold and encompassing silence of empty space. Debris pings off his plating.

First Aid can't see anything until he climbs to his feet and flicks on his spotlight, shining it into wreckage on the other side of the gap. The beam trembles as his hand shakes.

A burning sensation creeps around the edge of First Aid's open wound. He puts a hand over it reflexively, even though it does nothing to help, and lurches forward. He can feel the energon freezing in his lines. Mercifully, it stays the leaking, but the pain is so intense that his optical input blurs, fractal rainbows dancing in his visual feed.

First Aid swaps over to short range comms to say, "We have to go. My thermal regulation's offline."

Vortex backs up to the jagged edge of the walkway and opens his arms. In First Aid's transponder, his voice is soft and clear when he coaxes, "Come on. I got you," intimate, like he's speaking directly into First Aid's audial.

It's hard not to feel a twinge of — something. Hope, maybe, barely out of reach.

First Aid reaches for him, hands outstretched. He's dizzy with energon loss and feels like he might have one foot in the smelter already, but Vortex folds his arms around First Aid with immense care. Face buried against Vortex's neck, First Aid asks over comms, "Can you navigate without seeing where you're going?"

"Sure. I'll take you on a real flight sometime, show you some tricks," Vortex replies, hoisting First Aid closer to him. He's the only warmth that First Aid can feel, radiating heat from his chassis directly into First Aid's. "Hold on as tight as you can and try not to move."

First Aid loops his arms around Vortex's waist and locks his hands together. Vortex lifts him. A jolt of trepidation nearly makes him let go, but he keeps his grip locked in place. "You've done this before?"

The delay of the communicator clicking on has an edge of recklessness to it. First Aid looks up in alarm to find Vortex grinning down at him.

"Hang on tight," Vortex replies, then throws them both backwards off the edge of the broken walkway into empty space, blades spinning up in the vacuum, catching the tailwind of venting atmosphere.

*

They wheel backwards through the section of zero-g vacuum. The hull is cracked open like a giant organic egg and debris dots the space where the walkway is missing, floating in suspension, coated in collected ice, thick with dust. Vortex's rotors generate a soundless whump-whump-whump that First Aid feels through the vibration of his plating. It's two hundred and thirty one meters from one edge of the broken walkway to the other.

First Aid is torn between squeezing his optics shut and watching their progress, every sensor in his frame shrieking that he's going to fly off into open space, that he should be grounded as quickly as possible, that what he's doing is going to kill him.

For twenty nine seconds of pure terror, in the freezing cold of space, Vortex is First Aid's only anchor point. To his right he catches a glimpse of the endless expanse of nothingness, stars twinkling dimly in the distance, the barest pricks of light in a consuming emptiness.

Their landing is far less graceful than the takeoff. Vortex's momentum sends them spinning deeper into the open corridor and they crash against the deck as the artificial gravity seizes them again. First Aid loses his grip on Vortex and rolls across the metal, coming to a stop in a heap. He can only lie flat on his back, struggling unsuccessfully to suck atmosphere through his vents out of pure reflex. Every cycle is so cold it feels like fire across his internals.

He groans, gathering the strength to push himself upright. Vortex is crouched on the deck, billowing steam as he grips at one of his rotors, the metal bent at an ugly angle after the strut-shaking impact.

Across the gap, the sparkeater pauses where they were standing only moments before, grisly face split open. In horror, First Aid watches as it begins to climb along the side of the ship, tentacles pulling it along faster than he thought it could move.

The distance that seemed almost insurmountable now looks like hardly any space at all.

First Aid looks towards Vortex, who scrambles to help First Aid to his feet. Together, they lurch towards the closed blast door.

Behind it is the only path to safety left open to them. The corridor beyond will take them directly to the shuttle; once they're through the blast door it's only a few hundred more meters to the airlock. Vortex reaches the control panel first, a cable already extended, and First Aid stumbles through the door as it opens with a gust of depressurizing atmosphere.

It slams closed behind them as First Aid mashes the emergency close just as Vortex darts through. The sparkeater smashes into it as it comes down, an ominous thump of metal on metal. First Aid scrambles backwards, nearly tripping, and comes to a halt beside Vortex.

Vortex grabs First Aid by the hip and pulls him forward. "Go. It'll find a way around."

They turn and pelt towards the exit. He can see the broken crew airlock door still gaping open, the shuttle light spilling into the corridor, the tiny circle of light a sterile white beacon of safety.

One wrong step and the decking beneath his foot gives out, a section of the support beams rusted through. He sinks to his knee, the grating jammed agonizingly through the transformation seam of his other leg. Through the fresh round of pain, he registers Vortex flinging himself over the gap and sprawling flat as he lands badly on the other side of the section of collapsed walkway.

Vortex turns and reaches back to help First Aid. First Aid doesn't understand the grimace that contorts Vortex's features until it's too late.

In the split second of realization, First Aid thinks it must be sentient. It must. First Aid has no idea how it's moving around the ship so quickly if it isn't able to use the controls. If it doesn't understand.

An impossible weight hits First Aid's spinal strut. First Aid is flattened beneath it, crying out as his damaged t-cog is compressed between the edge of the collapsed deck and thirty tons of rank, thrashing metal. Pungent exhaust gusts down his back, the sparkeater's snarl right next to his audial.

Vortex moves like lightning, flinging himself back across the gap, claws extended. The weight is gone from First Aid as quickly as it came, but his lower half refuses to respond. He spits energon and drags himself forward hand over hand.

Metal crashes against metal and Vortex cries out. First Aid makes a wounded sound and redoubles his frantic scramble for purchase. If the sparkeater isn't trying to kill First Aid anymore, it's trying to kill Vortex.

He can't let that happen. Not now. Not when they're so close to being free of it.

First Aid struggles back onto the walkway, stripping wiring and scoring protoform as he tears himself free of the support lodged beneath his limb. He tumbles forward onto his hands and knees, the corridor a spinning blur. Congealing energon sloshes out of his chassis, painting the deck with a hideous, polluted slurry, and he fights the urge to fully collapse as his actuators strain under his own weight.

He looks up to find Vortex still and motionless, crumpled against the bulkhead, one optic flickering. Rebooting, his diagnostic suite offers helpfully. First Aid pushes himself upright, pulled by a rising thread of urgency, the pain receding into the background, drowned under every dormant combat protocol he has flaring to life all at once.

"Look at me, you fragger," First Aid snarls. "You've been trying to eat me. You gonna give up on me now?" The sparkeater turns away from Vortex, tentacles fanned out in a disorienting web over its back, and makes a sound like air escaping a bellows. It advances on First Aid, hollowed out optical sockets glowing like two flames in the dark.

Movement behind it catches his optic — Vortex, slowly climbing to his feet, dazed, alive — and a sudden, hot rage grips him.

Desperately, desperately, he can only think that somehow the crimes of the past keep crawling back up out of the depths to haunt him when all he's ever wanted to do is fix the messes others keep leaving behind.

He wrenches the prybar off of what's left of his shredded harness, pulls back his arm, and swings as hard as he can directly at the sparkeater's head.

The metal connects with a loud, bell-like sound. The sparkeater reels back, screeching, hands clawing at its face where the blow landed. First Aid lifts his arm again and strikes. The hooked end lands square with the sparkeater's fanned jaw and rips a panel away as he wrenches his arm back, flinging energon in a spattering arc across First Aid's face.

A tentacle whips out and lashes across his chest plating, a blind strike that leaves a searing gouge in its wake. It doesn't matter. He's damaged beyond belief. Whatever it does now is inconsequential. He grips the metal and strikes again — and again, and again, grinding his teeth until sparks pop over the sensors in his tongue.

The sparkeater hisses and slithers backwards, retreating even as he advances. First Aid can hear himself buzzing, all his fear subsumed by the strut-deep need to keep it away from Vortex.

He's not going to lose someone else. He's not. Not after all he worked for. Not after trudging through this slagging ship in the slagging dark. Not after frying himself and freezing himself and ripping himself to shreds and certainly not after finding Vortex. Not now. Not ever, if he can help it. He wants to live. He wants, desperately, to feel something besides resignation again. He raises his arm again.

A hand snatches at him from behind. He whirls, heaving, ready to fend off whatever else is coming his way, but it's Vortex, who retreats a few limping steps, hands held in front of him in a staying gesture. Energon is streaming freely down the side of Vortex's face.

First Aid lowers the pry bar and Vortex immediately snags First Aid by the shoulder and pulls him towards the shuttle. "Come on, come on, you did good." His claws sink into First Aid's arm, pulling hard, and the sensation shakes First Aid's processes into motion again. "Let's get out of here before it recovers."

The last few dozen meters are a wild scramble, First Aid's sensors throwing up dozens of threat detection reports, his processes scattered, still fixed on violence. His thoughts are frayed thin. The deck clatters beneath their footsteps, rattling with their weight, and he recoils from the flood of bright light as the shuttle's airlock door raises in front of him sooner than he expects.

First Aid stumbles into the shuttle, his limbs only cooperating in a general way, clumsy and weak. He’s a mess and it looks even worse with the lighting, the gore lurid in the stark white glow of the narrow hallway. The pain hasn’t dulled at all; the last round of the sparkeater’s venom is still battering his internal filtration systems, an uphill battle made worse by the fact there's not much left in his lines to filter.

He moves into the corridor between the airlock and the medical facilities, then leans against the storage lockers, smearing them with energon. In the bright, clean light he can see he's dripping a blackened sludge. Beneath it all, exhaustion sucks at his thoughts.

The only reason he isn't in cascading systems failure is because his redundancies make him nearly impossible to be killed quickly without shooting out his spark chamber or slagging his processor. Any other mech might be dead twice over.

"Frag," is all Vortex says and First Aid turns.

His spark sinks.

"No," First Aid hears himself say. It's too late to go for the door controls. The thing is already inside, pulling itself along, dripping ichor from its spread jaws.

It lunges. First Aid flinches back, but there's nowhere to run. He's trapped, nothing but more corridor behind him and supply lockers bolted in tight on either side of him.

Vortex shoves First Aid out of the way and the sparkeater snags him instead, snarling, toppling him to the deck with a swift yank of Vortex's legs.

First Aid reaches out a hand to catch Vortex, but he's too slow. Vortex slides away from First Aid across the deck, claws catching and ripping up sections of rubber matting as he's dragged forcibly backwards.

The sparkeater spears Vortex through the thigh with one sharp tentacle and Vortex yowls, a vicious, angry sound, and engages his rotor. The blades spin up with a terrible whine in the enclosed space, shredding everything they come in contact with. Glass containers burst explosively across the narrow galley, shards pinging off First Aid's plating.

He scrambles forward and then stops when it becomes apparent he has no idea which set of limbs belongs to who in the fray. Vortex is all sharp edges, bristling, snarling, a turbine roar that drowns out everything else. First Aid dampens the input to his audials and drags himself upright to look for anything to use as a weapon as Vortex and the sparkeater go twisting back towards the open walkway still connected to the Acid Rain.

Vortex curses, yanking at the tentacle pinning him to the bulkhead. He braces his feet beneath him on the edge of the storage locker and shoves off towards the sparkeater, claws outstretched, and hits his mark dead on. First Aid watches in nauseated horror as Vortex bites down on the sparkeater's shoulder strut with an audible screech of metal. It thrashes, limbs lashing, clawing at Vortex, but he hangs on with a vicious tenacity.

Hydraulic fluid gushes from the wound and the strut snaps, dislodging Vortex. He sprawls backwards onto the grating, an impact that shakes anything not bolted down, but is back on his feet so quickly First Aid barely registers the energon dripping from Vortex's mouth.

The damaged rotor blade is now twisted at a grisly angle near the base, bolts snapped off at the attachment point, the damage preventing the entire rotor from spinning.

Vortex reaches back and rips it off of his frame, flipping it in his hand like a weapon, and advances towards the sparkeater, energon dripping down his chin, fangs bared. His plating ripples from shoulder to hip, flaring and then clamping down, and he looks more like a walking weapon than First Aid could've ever predicted. An awful sound rises from Vortex, harsh and grating.

He's laughing, First Aid realizes. The fragger is laughing.

First Aid staggers to a halt, watching in shocked despair as Vortex darts in faster than First Aid's targeting systems can keep up with in real time. He drops his blaster with a clatter — his in-HUD reticule is a full quarter second behind Vortex's flurry of blows and throwing laggy clusters of error messages as it keeps losing a firing vector.

The sparkeater skitters backwards, moving strangely. First Aid's uncertain if it's fleeing or searching for a more favorable angle, but it darts forward almost immediately and bats at Vortex, hissing. It's a predator, not a soldier, and gives more ground than it gets.

Vortex leaps forward down the narrow galley corridor, skidding along the metal grating so hard he kicks up sparks. He's wielding his own broken rotor blade as a makeshift sword, jabbing viciously through a dozen flailing tentacles. They tumble into the cargo bay. The sparkeater circles around him, slowly forcing Vortex backwards towards the airlock tunnel despite his brutal assault.

His mouth is fixed in a grimace, lips peeled back from his fangs, jaw clenched and energon spilling from his mouth. The sparkeater surges forward and Vortex spits it into its face, spraying gore over its optics.

It keeps coming blindly, a thin feedback wail rising from its spreading jaws.

First Aid isn't a tactician and even he can see Vortex is losing his advantage despite the frenzy of his attacks — he's not doing enough damage to the sparkeater quickly enough to turn the tide in his favor.

Vortex needs his help. A sudden, terrible calm settles over First Aid, the terror and pain draining away into background noise. If the mech the Functionist experiments contorted into this creature was ever in reach of saving, he'll have to live with that knowledge after the fact.

He seizes the plasma cutter off of the workbench and has to catch himself as he turns, slipping in oil and slime. The sparkeater shrieks and whips its tentacles wildly, tearing open storage lockers and scattering supplies as Vortex forces the entirety of his own severed rotor blade up into its midsection, spearing it through.

First Aid yanks the plasma cutter's safety into the OFF position and slams his palm down on the ignition. It spits and hisses as the gasses heat unevenly, and then the cutter face bursts to life all at once into a line of dazzling blue light.

He staggers forward and brings the center of the plasma arc directly down on the sparkeater's exposed spinal strut.

The smell is awful. His busted filtration mask does nothing to suppress the scent of charred wiring and burning slag. It billows up in gouts: there's a wet spurting and then oil and energon boil into scalding vapor. Tentacles catch and rip at both of them, trying desperately to strike some killing blow, but First Aid ignores the flailing and presses forward.

Vortex locks optics with First Aid over the sparkeater's shoulder, his expression savage, and shoves the sparkeater onto the plasma cutter as it tries to squirm away, squealing, a horrible, wounded animal sound.

It's strong, but First Aid is strong too, and he digs in, bullying forward. Vortex release his grip on the blade and slips to the side as it tries to free itself from the cutting beam. The sparkeater pitches forward into the open tunnel, one arm unpowered and the other pulling itself away from the volcanic edge of the plasma cutter. It retreats halfway and then collapses in a steaming, unmoving heap.

Three of its lashing tentacles lie severed, smoking and twitching, in the mouth of the airlock. First Aid kicks them frantically into the tunnel after it. He doesn't want any part of that thing left on his shuttle.

Vortex slams his hand down over the airlock control panel, mashing the emergency closure button, and the door comes crashing down, sealing them inside.

Safe. Safe. They're safe. Everything that dropped out comes rushing back in again. First Aid leans heavily against the bulkhead next to the airlock, killing the power to the plasma cutter, and drops it at his feet, no longer able to lift the arm holding it.

"Hey, it's gone, shh," Vortex says, and First Aid realizes he's making a horrible sound from his vocal synthesizer. He cuts it as Vortex takes First Aid by both arms and halts his slow slide towards the deck. "Frag, you popped your clamps."

"We have to get out of here," First Aid says, not entirely convinced the sparkeater isn't going to come bursting back through the closed airlock at any moment. Some distant part of him registers that he might finally be hitting his theoretical maximum amount of trauma — a cold shock settles in, his vision pixelating. "I have to get to the flight controls."

"You need to sit down," Vortex says, urgent, pulling at him. First Aid can tell from Vortex's expression alone he must be even more badly damaged than he realized. This is the first time Vortex has gotten a good look at him under bright lighting. "You need the medbay."

"What?" First Aid looks down at the hole carved in his own plating and says, "Oh," because he can see completely through parts of himself. First Aid hovers a hand over where his abdominal plating would be and says, "That's really not good."

He drops to his knees as a dozen cascading systems failure alerts he's been forcibly ignoring come screaming back into the foreground.

*

First Aid comes online on the shuttle's deck, haphazardly hooked up to wires, tubing sprouting from open gaps in his frame. He reaches up and paws at the portable monitor. The display flickers awake, his vitals scrolling past. None of them are particularly encouraging, but they haven't dropped for the last eleven minutes, every single readout a steady but unpleasant orange.

His optical input is glitching, but he's not crashing. Whatever Vortex did put a stop to that. He reaches down and follows the cabling. External power, data monitoring, fluid hookups. Basic triage. Vortex would have access to the relevant data with his original function, whether he's used it before or not.

It's a temporary fix; the second he unhooks he'll lose all the fuel back into own chassis.

"You gonna stay with me this time?" Vortex asks, his hands flying over the shuttle's controls, the shuttle's engines humming to life. From the way he moves, he's flown a ship like this before, which takes some of the processing strain off First Aid, who's currently only really able to be occupied with figuring out how to stay out of protective shutdown the second he comes off external support. "Hate to admit it, but we're coming to the limits of my medical knowledge."

"You’d be fine without me," First Aid says, fumbling through the closest medical supplies drawer. He finds a container of heavy duty clamps, but his hands are shaking too badly, his sensors numb. First Aid fumbles the first one he picks up. It rolls out of reach with a tinkling, metallic sound.

Vortex puts out a foot to stop it before it disappears under a console and kicks it back in First Aid's direction. First Aid selects a second one more carefully and peels away the tangled mess of his collapsed structural underlayment to hunt for severed fuel lines.

"You dying would put a real damper on my plans to con you into being my Conjunx," Vortex says while First Aid works to graft a replacement tube over the end of a connector.

It startles a laugh out of First Aid. It hurts badly, a fresh bolt of pain ripping through him from his processor to the base of his spinal strut. But it feels like being alive, too. "You can't be serious. You don't even know me."

"You won't ever find out if you die on me now," Vortex says, flashing energon-covered fangs at First Aid. An alarm sounds as he dumps the extendable walkway entirely. He silences it and punches the throttle wide open. First Aid is grateful he doesn't have to be the one to pilot the shuttle right now. He's not sure he could finish the undocking sequence, much less engage the autopilot.

He needs something better than clamps for the larger lines. First Aid pulls himself along the deck a few meters, yanks open a drawer, and closes his hand around his triage kit. The thermal bonder is front and center when he finally works it open. At least there's no shortage of patch tubing on hand. He pulls the storage cabinet open and drags down one of the bins stacked full of salvaged parts.

Hand hovering over the supplies, he feels a twinge of regret for not being able to save more, but even from a purely practical standpoint, his medical expertise is more important than a few extra shipping crates of spare fuel pumps and replacement circuitry.

First Aid selects a length of tubing and begins, painfully, clumsily, replacing the main lines. He'll be in much better shape when he can restore the majority of his circulation.

"Did it blow?" First Aid asks without looking up.

"Setting the timer now," Vortex says, claws flying over the controls. "Confirming. Six minutes until safe distance at current speed. I'll set it for seven."

A seal forms and he shudders all over at the strange gurgle in his lines. First Aid checks his fuel levels again. His tanks are nearly empty, thirty decaliters hemorrhaged over less than seventeen minutes. More before that. He's seen patients die from less.

He has Vortex to thank for still being alive. First Aid glances up at the battered line of Vortex's frame in profile and tries to think of anything at all that could express his gratitude.

The pressure returns a poor but stable reading. His fuel levels don't drop as he begins to test reprofusion of his remaining fuel lines. There's not much of him left, but everything critical is sealed and he still has feeder lines patched into the lower half of his chassis. Some of the more urgent alerts abate.

First Aid pries his broken filtration mask and damaged visor off, then rubs his hand over his bare face before examining them. They're junked beyond repair — he'll have to refabricate them completely — so he discards them on the deck.

A small price to pay in the grand scheme of things. He can live without the convenience for a while. He opens his mouth and pants, head tipped back against the bulkhead, shutting his optics. The cold air feels good on his overheated cranial components. Some of the urgency drains out of him. He's going to be fine. A dozen internal monitors are still bleating at him, but none of them are immediately lethal.

He opens his optics at the sound of footsteps.

Vortex crouches down in front of him, peering into First Aid's open chassis. "That looks slagged. You're sure you're good?"

"I'm stable, not good. Big difference. Give me a hand," First Aid says, reaching beneath a mess of power cabling and snagging the leading edge of a severed wire. "Can you hold this part of my sensor net out of the way?"

"You're a wreck," Vortex says appreciatively, supporting a mess of wires and cabling that probably shouldn't be dangling so loosely. "Primus, even your internals are hot. Look at you."

"Keep it in your panels," First Aid groans, feeling blindly around in the caudal chamber of his abdominal cavity. There's a mess of wet, congealed energon and oil gumming up his search. "I can't find my fuel main. I think it's gone."

"How are you even alive? Slag me," Vortex pushes First Aid’s hand out of the way and ducks his head to look more closely. "It's definitely gone."

"Built to be blown up," First Aid mumbles. Blown up, shot, crushed, and still haul mechs five times his size out from under collapsed buildings. He's grateful he's so durable, but he's watched combat ready mechs go into protective shutdown over much less. Blissful darkness is sounding pretty good to his abused sensory system right now.

"Lucky me," Vortex says and takes the clamps and tubing from First Aid. "I like playing rough."

"I know," First Aid says, putting his hand briefly on top of Vortex's head. He has a pretty good view of what Vortex is doing, which is mostly correct. He reaches down and guides Vortex to the connection point on his fuel pump, which isn’t in a standard place. "Cinch it tight or it'll pop off like last time."

"You have any idea how good you look when you’re giving orders?" Vortex asks. First Aid hears a telltale click and gurgle of his fuel pump engaging and his transformation seams clench into a wave from top to bottom, the relief straddling the weird line between pain and pleasure. His vitals don't improve immediately, but subjectively he feels like at least one foot is back out of the grave.

"Pass me some more of the med grade. There's extra in the bottom shelf, third cabinet from the left." Thankfully their fuel supply didn't get trashed in the melee. Vortex brings him three cylinders, the contents glowing a cheerful, diluted pink in their quick-fill syringes, and he empties the contents directly into his uncapped fuel tank, one after the other.

First Aid's hands move more smoothly when his fluid pressure is restored. His ventilations come stronger with good positive pressure in his radiator. He reaches into his chassis and feels around again. A fresh crop of error messages crowds his internal monitor now the pressure alert's been downgraded to an issue of moderate concern, but there are too many of them to pinpoint where the root cause is.

He shoves them all aside and manually drills down layer by layer, assessing. Fluid levels are shoddy but rising, most of his electrical is stable, and he has enough coolant flow restored he isn't going to slag his processor overheating. "Good news, I don't think I'm going to die. I need the equipment in the repair bay."

"Come on," Vortex says and staggers to his feet, pulling hard on First Aid's arms. He looks suddenly exhausted. He's badly damaged himself. Now First Aid isn't in danger of immediate death, he can cast a critical optic over Vortex's injuries, too. "Help me out, here. You're fragging heavy for someone your size. What do they make medics out of?"

"Mostly defrag debt and medical grade energon," First Aid mutters, giving Vortex an assist on getting him off his aft. He wobbles a little when he's fully vertical, but he doesn't feel like he's constantly about to pitch face first into the floor. He takes hold of the support post on the medical monitor and does his best to drag it along with them. The going is slow.

They hobble together towards the shuttle's small critical care station in the repair bay, Vortex propping his other side up as they go. There's a storage locker with emergency equipment overhead and First Aid opens it, pulling out supplies, one bin after another.

Vortex helps lift him up onto the edge of the repair table when he gestures for a hand.

"Wanna watch the light show?" Vortex asks, nodding at the main viewscreen, a sliver of it still visible down the trashed corridor.

"Not really," First Aid says, turning his face away. He still feels a little sick at all the waste, even if it's for the best. "Tell me when it's done."

"I can catch the recording," Vortex says, low and warm, looking steadily at First Aid.

He ducks his head. Well. Evidently Vortex's interest in him survived the mauling and their escape.

First Aid peels the remaining scraps of his abdominal plating away from the inner layer of protoform. Vortex watches with his blades angled up, not bothering to conceal his interest. It's a fairly gory process, but the tiny energon capillaries are already isolated from the main fuel supply and he only has to stop twice to mop away the residual seepage.

There's still the hole punched straight through his protoform beneath. The metal is strangely flexible without the armor plating over it, only the surviving underlayment — of which there's very little — providing any kind of rigidity. He makes a beckoning gesture at the mesh patches.

Vortex passes him the entire bin without needing to be asked.

First Aid layers them one over the other, passing the thermal bonder over the edge of each one so they adhere. His protoform will consume the material for repairs, then repurpose any remaining nanites towards other structural defects. It's not perfect, but it'll keep him from accumulating debris inside his chassis until he can do something more permanent.

He picks up the removed armor plate and holds it up to the light. The sparkeater punched a hole clean through it, which is cause enough for concern. Worse is the fracture; an ugly split along the caudal face renders it completely unusable. "That's slagged."

"You going to walk around with your protoform out?" Vortex asks. He caresses at stretch edge of undamaged metal with the tips of his claws. Smoother and more malleable than exterior armor, it flexes slightly under Vortex's touch. The sentio metallico responds to the sensors in Vortex's fingers, tingling.

"For a day or two," First Aid says, tossing the junk metal aside. It always feels odd to discard something that was once a piece of his own body, no matter how many times he's done it. That particular peice has never been replaced. "Until I can modify a piece from the salvage pile."

Vortex slides his hands carefully around First Aid's waist, avoiding the open panel. "What now?"

First Aid holds his hands out, coaxing. They're still smeared with a slurry of energon and other fluids, but he figures that's probably the least of their concerns. He's going to look forward to his decontamination shower. "Let me look at that head injury. You could end up with processor damage if that fuel routing isn't fixed."

Vortex bows his head obediently, folding his arms across First Aid's lap. His weight is a steady comfort, rock solid and impenetrably steady. If he's bothered by First Aid's probing inspection, which must be painful, he doesn't mention it.

First Aid clips off the damaged tubing with steadier hands than he's had since they left the engine room. The injury is messy, slicing through several peripheral fuel lines, but it looks like the sparkeater missed his major sensory components. Vortex's luck has held. First Aid wipes down the raw edges of metal with a sterilizer and smooths a patch over it so no particulate contaminants collect on the congealing liquid.

Vortex bumps his brow against First Aid's shoulder, then straightens. His tac visor is in pretty bad shape, cracked in a few places. First Aid detaches it, revealing Vortex's optics. They're undamaged and clear. They focus on First Aid intently when he sets the visor aside and cups Vortex's battered face.

First Aid pulls him upright and kisses him, a tentative brush of his mouth over Vortex's. It earns him a satisfied hum from Vortex's chassis and he feels steadier, more certain of his welcome, of where he stands. He says, "Okay, let's check the rest."

Vortex is far better off than First Aid is, so there's not much to do but patch and stabilize. The sparkeater punctured a few fuel lines, busted the primary actuator in his left knee, and shredded too much sensory wiring in Vortex's thigh to detangle. First Aid works carefully through the mess, capping off power cabling, tying off lines, and painting over damaged protoform with a quick dry sealant. Vortex submits to it all quietly, watching First Aid work with a stillness that reads more as exhaustion than ease.

First Aid's fuel pump lurches when he thinks about Vortex lying limp in the corridor while the sparkeater advanced. For a few seconds, he'd been convinced Vortex was actually dead.

"I'm going to have horrible fluxes about this for ages," First Aid mutters, Vortex's forearm resting in the loose circle of his hand. "Are you okay?"

Vortex doesn't answer, but crawls up onto the repair table and puts his head down in First Aid's lap. First Aid touches the back of his neck and then runs his knuckles over Vortex's collar, half an inspection, half a reassurance to himself Vortex is still there. Real and alive.

There's a subtle tremble to his frame. First Aid notes it, rubbing his hand down the stretch of plating over Vortex's spinal strut. The metal contracts in the wake of his touch. His damaged rotor assembly looks hideous with the housing bent and the blade snapped off, but First Aid can't do much about it until he has access to proper fabrication facilities.

"Thank you," First Aid says, almost inaudible over the background noise of the shuttle's engine taking them away from the derelict. "You could've left me at any point."

Vortex hears him and turns his head to the side, blinking slowly up at First Aid. "Nah. I'm a slagger, but I ain't stupid. Don't think mechs like you come along often."

First Aid is struck suddenly with the feeling the whole thing was worth it to have Vortex laying half on top of him, idly toying with First Aid's knee joint with the tips of his claws.

The sparkeater behind him, out of danger, he thinks of Ambulon again, then carefully boxes up his guilt. First Aid will deal with his old ghosts some other time, when Vortex isn't sprawled across his lap. He's tired of missing out on joy while suffocating under the fear of losing it again.

"What you thinking about so hard?" Vortex asks, a low, pleased rumble of his turbine evident under First Aid's hand. It's funny — he's hasn't complained this entire time. Not once.

First Aid considers Vortex for a second and then strokes a hand over the top of Vortex's head, feeling his expression soften. He says, "Going home."

Chapter Text

First Aid wakes warm an hour out from the Luna 2 intercept hub. So much of him still hurts, but the aches are fading as his self-repair incorporates the replacement parts. Vortex is curled against his back, shivering faintly, so he turns and burrows deeper into Vortex’s grip until it stops. Six days isn’t much time to know someone, but it’s enough time to know a few things.

"Hey," First Aid says, pressing his face against Vortex’s shoulder. He's warm, so First Aid lingers there, letting it beat back the faint ache still lingering in his frame. "We’re almost here."

It's difficult to want to rouse him, but First Aid has to get him through processing and register him as a returning Cybertronian citizen, no longer KIA. There's a formal process for it — the mass pardon turned up a significant number of presumed dead that were just waiting out the war on some alien planet, biding their time until they could come home.

First Aid doesn't blame them.

He gives Vortex a gentle shake. "Come on. You have to get up."

"Gross," Vortex grumbles. "Can we turn around? M’not done recharging."

"Lazy today," First Aid says fondly, running a hand over his side. Vortex’s frame is still repairing, his spark still integrating. First Aid’s fairly sure Vortex will always be a little tired, a little unsettled in his frame; he’s already making plans on how he can help offset the worst symptoms. "I have to get you cleared through the medical checkpoint and then you can recharge as much as you want."

First Aid disentangles himself, climbs out of the berth, and begins mixing the supplements for both of them to refuel. Vortex rouses slowly; First Aid has time before the complaints begin to top his own tanks and prep Vortex's mineral slurry. It strikes him halfway back to the berth with Vortex's cube that he's already gotten into the habit of having Vortex with him. That it feels good.

Vortex sits up and drapes himself against First Aid the moment he gets within reach. He's incredibly warm and sweet when he comes out of recharge, a stark contrast to his usual quicksilver commentary and almost supernatural talent for being perpetually underfoot.

First Aid likes him both ways. He's so different from anyone else First Aid has ever spent time with, unabashed, unrepentant, and so deeply open with both his virtues and his vices.

He wraps his arm around Vortex, holding him for a moment. A flush of charge darts through his lines and he regrets not setting his internal alarm twenty minutes earlier. After the worst of his internal damage was patched, Vortex spent some time introducing First Aid to some of his sharper tastes.

First Aid discovered a few new live wires of his own along the way.

"Come on," First Aid says, lifting Vortex onto his feet. Vortex makes a nuisance of himself by going limp and draping himself over First Aid, mouthing at his neck cabling. "The faster we get through this, the faster you can climb back into the berth."

"Only if you're in it," Vortex mumbles against his jaw. He steals a kiss and crowds First Aid back against the bulkhead, getting his claws on First Aid's aft before the autopilot chimes an alert the shuttle's docking sequence is initiating. A low rumble vibrates through them both as Vortex's turbine engages. "Not yet."

First Aid can't quite resist the temptation to linger in Vortex's embrace. He runs his hands down meters of plating, feeling the flex and construction of Vortex's frame. First Aid's become very familiar with the places Vortex likes to be touched, which is almost everywhere, and it doesn't take much encouragement for Vortex to get a thigh between his legs and both hands on First Aid's aft.

"Vortex," he murmurs, head tipped back, Vortex's mouth working beneath his chin, sucking at the tender hollow of his throat. "If we don't go now we won't beat the colony ship about to dock behind us."

"Is it a big one?" Vortex says and then sticks his tongue into the gap between First Aid's collar.

"Crew list is seventy nine," First Aid says, hands braced on Vortex's shoulders, biting back a grin. "Civilian cargo three times that many."

"So we can wait in the berth for them to finish," Vortex says into his plating, the purring rumble of his words muffled by a mouthful of metal. "I can do that thing you like."

"I have a hot oil tub in my hab," First Aid says, a last ditch effort. Waiting in the berth doesn't actually sound like a bad idea, but he'd rather do it somewhere with more space for activities.

That gets Vortex's attention, he rears up, optics bright, and licks his fangs. "Why didn't you say so sooner?"

First Aid laughs and finally nudges him off, pressing the cube of energon into his hands. "Come on. Drink up and we'll debark. It won't take long."

The station is bustling compared to the last time First Aid passed through. There are a number of mechs First Aid doesn't recognize — colonists, neutrals, mechs who've likely never been to Cybertron at all — but a few he does and he waves back as they pass for outbound ships. Vortex earns a few curious looks, but no one they meet recognizes him. He's been wondering if there's anyone — maybe someone in Polyhex. Soundwave might know.

"People recognize you," Vortex says, angling a look sideways at him.

"There aren't that many formally educated doctors left on Cybertron," First Aid says. "My skills are in high demand. I meet a lot of patients."

"Why were you offworld if you're so popular?" Vortex asks, the first time he's brought it up.

"I was training colonists to do what I do," First Aid says. "Ratchet's doing the same here. Everything helps shift the load around." They make it to the customs hub and First Aid swings them around into the small line to check in. "The colonies are important for trade. We can't rebuild without some sort of inter-species commerce. Not at this point."

That seems to be a satisfactory enough answer for Vortex, who turns his attention towards the small crowd waiting to be processed through. They slip into line behind half a dozen other mechs First Aid doesn't know. None of them are obviously bearing any kind of badge or insignia.

Vortex gets bored during the short wait and takes it out on First Aid by trying to scrape at a rough weld still integrating on First Aid's side paneling. First Aid grabs Vortex's claws and holds them firmly in his own and gets a mildly petulant look in return, but the mech working the counter calls them up only a minute after, so Vortex ambles forward with his documentation held out, only slightly crumpled.

"Documents, please," the mech behind the window says. Her green optics brighten and swivel down to scrutinizing pinpricks at the sight of Vortex. She extends a delicate set of claws, her paint an opalescent sea foam color. A badge magnetized to her chest identifies her as Coastline. First Aid passes a copy of the forms to her through the slot in the acrylic window and gestures for Vortex to do the same.

"First Aid," he says. "Ident code 4518G, medic. Returning with a new permanent resident, Vortex, no ident code issued."

"Ah, you've filled out a custodial —" Coastline looks up at Vortex, holding the sheet of plastic flimsy up to compare his description. "Your notes say he was incarcerated in spark containment?"

"Yes," First Aid says promptly, smiling encouragingly at her in a way he hopes makes it clear he's unwilling to back down. "Proper medical protocol was followed for spark reimplantation of a prisoner after confirmation of completion of their full sentence, per version 3.115 of the revised Common Code. That's the section outlawing spark containment as cruel and unusual punishment, if you weren't familiar."

"And the records expunged, yes," she says with only a hint of irritation at being reminded how to do her job. "Total pardon." Then, to Vortex, "Your lucky day, I suppose. Congratulations and welcome home."

She hands the flimsies back to First Aid, along with a resource and identity registration packet for Vortex, and they go filtering through the scanners. It takes halfway to forever to get to the other side; Vortex's built in weapons systems are old enough they keep setting off alerts and a supervisor has to come by and clear him through manually.

Vortex comes out the other side of the inspection line bristling, his plating ruffled almost comically. He mutters, "I prefer the sparkeater."

"You do not," First Aid says, stifling a smile.

"At least it made sense," Vortex counters narrowly, but the angle of his blades grows less sharp when First Aid puts a hand on his side and coaxes him out into the transit corridor leading back to their shuttle. Vortex looks around. "This place is kind of a slag heap, ain't it?"

"The planet is even worse," First Aid says. "Few million years of bombing each other into component parts doesn't leave much of a scenic view. But no one's going without fuel."

Vortex hums faintly, head turned away so First Aid can't see his expression. He's looking out of the massive, curving window that opens into space, the force field shimmering over the exterior rendering all the stars nothing more than blurry white pinpricks against the darkness.

The station rotates as they walk together, First Aid's arm still around Vortex, and Cybertron comes into view, the storms over the Rust Sea heavy and red against the dark ruins of a world that nearly died. It looks awful, but here and there are shining patches, growing microscopically from this distance, like someone's polished corrosion off old metal: Iacon, Polyhex, Vos.

They slow to look, then pause altogether, in sync. For the first time since the war ended, First Aid sees how beautiful it could be. How beautiful it is. It's the only home they have. Vortex puts his hand low on First Aid's spinal strut, claws tapping out an uneven rhythm.

"So — I'm staying with you," Vortex says neutrally, looking down at the planet. It's not quite a question, even though it feels like one. They haven't actually talked about what Vortex is doing when he gets back to Cybertron. First Aid has been holding his hopes and assumptions carefully aside.

"I'd like that," First Aid says, warmth blooming around his spark. Vortex doesn't say anything for long enough First Aid finally gives in and glances at him.

Vortex is grinning down at him, all fang, his optics intensely bright. "I knew it. You do want to keep me as a berthwarmer."

First Aid laughs. For the first time in centuries he feels awake. It's a hot, raw feeling, like an exposed wire, but it's good, too. He tugs at Vortex's arm, pulling towards their shuttle. "Come on. The quicker we go, the quicker I can give you the tour," he says, and Vortex follows along after, optics fixed on First Aid and his expression so smug that First Aid is going to kiss it off him the second they're behind a closed door.