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[Cybertron, outskirts of Polyhex]
Ash settled in a thin veil over the wreckage, turning the air, still shimmering with residual heat, into a dense haze. The Polyhex command headquarters had been reduced to a twisted skeleton, barely visible through the smoke. It had been the fastest offensive the Decepticons had launched since the war began — and the fastest Autobots’ evacuation. The headquarters had held its ground until the very last moment, knowing it was covering the retreat of the field hospital. The instant the CMO confirmed that the last shuttle carrying the wounded was away, the command staff abandoned the position. There was no point in holding it any longer.
Ratchet moved quickly — far more quickly than was wise with a damaged knee stabilizer. During the brief skirmish that covered the withdrawal, he'd been forced into close combat, and now he limped noticeably on his right leg, instinctively grimacing whenever the scorched plates of his shoulder armor and chassis scraped together as he moved. But slowing down was simply not an option. Not now.
Dust. Soot. Burned cable fibers. His chemoreceptors had gone offline, overwhelmed by the thick haze that still hung over the battlefield. The sky was dull, as though someone had extinguished the sun and left behind nothing but this muted light, as dim and smoke-stained as his own battered armor.
Optimus's signal kept breaking apart — brief pulses, erratic coordinates. But it was there.
It was still on Ratchet's scanner.
Ratchet knew that kind of signal. He knew how Optimus manipulated his damage telemetry to keep his mechs from worrying. As though this were the first time instead of the five hundredth. As though he could fool someone who had stood beside him for so long that a single glyph was enough to warn him when real disaster was closing in.
"Where are you?" Ratchet breathed, sweeping yet another sector with his scanner. "Where are you, you giant idiot…"
The beacon signal was weak, intermittent. And the farther Ratchet pushed forward, the clearer it became: Optimus had broken protocol. He hadn't evacuated with the others. He'd stayed behind, intercepting the main Decepticon force while headquarters fought to cover the frontline units' withdrawal. He'd stayed behind — as always, protecting his people. As always, alone.
Ratchet pressed on almost blindly, letting instinct guide him through the shattered wreckage and the smoldering husks of destroyed machinery. His handheld scanner emitted an incessant stream of warning chirps, failing to lock onto any active signatures, while every step carried the restrained, simmering urgency that had taken hold of him.
Then— movement. A silhouette.
Optimus was sitting against a disabled cargo hauler that had toppled onto one side and was still smoking. His back rested against the vehicle's roof as he vented in slow, ragged bursts. One servo was jammed halfway through transformation; the ignition coils flickered on and off in repeated, futile attempts to return the arm to a stable configuration. The other trembled under obvious strain, clamped tightly over his abdominal plating, where a thin sheen of energon glimmered between his fingers.
"No… no, no, no…" Ratchet's pedes scraped across the dust-covered pavement before he stopped short against his own will.
The Prime's signature sharpened on his scanner — a flickering outline that matched, with horrifying precision, the battered frame before him, every deep gouge and crushed armor plate accounted for.
Optimus looked up. Too slowly. Too unevenly.
His faceplate wore its usual calm expression, but to a medic who knew every subtle shift the Prime was capable of, the sight was genuinely terrifying. It was the expression of someone forcing unbearable pain beneath sheer discipline long after the limits of endurance had been exceeded. His dentas grated as the vent shutters struggled open, and when he spoke, his vocoder collapsed into little more than a whisper.
"…I told you… not to come. Too… risky."
"To slag with the risk!" Ratchet snarled, surprising even himself.
He crossed the remaining distance in a single stride and dropped to his knees without sparing his already failing knee stabilizer. A surge of pain raced through his frame, radiating along damaged hydraulics and overloaded sensory net before flaring into his shoulder. He ripped the portable scanner from his belt, hastily brushing ash from its casing.
"Next time," he growled, activating the scanner, "you can just ship your frame to the medbay in neatly labeled boxes. It'll save me the trouble of having to hunt down all the pieces."
Optimus said nothing. He simply looked at Ratchet, his optics flickering uneasily as his EM field surged outward in a long, cold wave.
The scanner erupted into a solid stream of red glyphs — a diagnostic readout packed with critical failures and damaged subsystems. Ratchet looked up, his gaze darting to the Prime's broad hand, still pressed tightly against his abdominal plating and slick with dark streaks of energon. The color alone was enough to set off alarm bells; the energon was visibly contaminated with oil and coolant.
"Let me see it." After taking a couple of deep ventilation cycles, Ratchet nodded toward Optimus's hand. The Prime raised his optic ridges uncertainly, and Ratchet clarified, "If your self-repair systems have failed and the leak gets worse, I'll clamp it off before you bleed out."
The Prime continued watching him with the detached resignation of someone who had long ago accepted the likelihood of his own deactivation. Then, without warning, that unnatural calm gave way to a flash of concern.
"Leave… my friend. They may… come back…"
Ratchet couldn't tell what it was that crashed hot and heavy into his Spark chamber — raw anger, stunned disbelief, or another pain in his damaged knee stabilizer. Whatever it was, he buried it on instinct, forcing the sensation aside as he boosted the scanner's diagnostic routines. Raising the device, he let out a low, strained rev of his engine.
Optimus caught the sound immediately and flinched on reflex. Concern for his subordinate's safety clashed with the deeply ingrained protocols of command. In situations like this, Ratchet had full authority to issue orders — even to a Prime. Especially to a Prime.
Optimus vented again with a harsh metallic rasp, lowered his helm, and slowly relaxed his grip. Ratchet shifted closer, refocused his optics for a better look— and swore. Quietly, barely above a whisper. The language, however, was vivid enough to make even Unicron wince.
Half the armor covering Optimus's abdominal section was simply gone. The structures beneath lay fully exposed, twitching with uneven pulses beneath the open air. Damaged internal dampeners. A crippled fuel transfer pump. Bent T-cog guide rails. Filters shredded into ribbons. Melted wiring. The warped outlines of the rear struts. Every component was slick with dark blue energon fouled by oil and coolant. The wound itself told its own story: its ragged, torn edges spoke not of a clean point-blank shot, but of a devastating glancing impact that had ripped the armor away.
It was a disaster. Ratchet had treated worse injuries over the course of the war, yet the sight still made his fuel tanks churn.
Optimus continued to watch him with the same absurdly calm expression. When Ratchet froze for a couple of seconds, optics flickering with focused concern as he processed the damage, the Prime spoke in an almost apologetic voice.
"I can walk, Ratchet. Just a litt—"
"Quiet."
He said it softly. No shout. No sharp edge. Yet somehow the air itself seemed to still.
Optimus fell silent at once, lowering his gaze. Under Ratchet's command, the medbay was always a place of loud but organized chaos. Everyone knew, however, that when the Chief Medical Officer suddenly became quiet, the situation had turned truly critical.
"That's better."
Ratchet slowly vented pressure through his systems, the grilles giving a low metallic whistle. With practiced efficiency, he slid aside the protective cover over Optimus's medical interface port and connected his patchcord, immediately beginning to dampen the Prime's sensory net.
"You are not walking. Technically, you shouldn't even be moving if you intend to keep your legs."
His voice remained level, clinical.
"Your primary fuel transfer pump is damaged. The central stabilizer hasn't failed completely, but the shunts are on the verge of giving out. Your rear struts are less than five millimeters from catastrophic rupture." He paused for only a fraction of a second. "And I can hear the injectors in your secondary fuel pump rattling. You move one more time, Prime, and I'll dismantle you myself, right here, just to make sure the Decepticons don't get the honor."
Ratchet powered down the scanner and clipped it back onto his belt. His fingers betrayed him with a faint tremor — not from exhaustion, but from strain, from the sheer reality of what lay before him. A familiar flash of irritation rippled through his systems. It was the feeling he always got whenever he had to solve an impossible problem with next to nothing to work with.
There was no repairing damage on this scale out here. The best he could do was stabilize the mess and somehow get Optimus back to the field hospital.
Running through the contents of his medical cases in his head, Ratchet reached an unpleasant conclusion: something would have to be sacrificed. He didn't have enough support rails to assemble a proper corset brace, but one of the storage containers was rigid enough to substitute for the missing structural material.
"You're wasting precious time, my friend," Optimus said quietly, watching as Ratchet hurriedly emptied one of the medical cases, stuffing everything nonessential into subspace before taking a cutting laser to the empty container. "You should immediately—"
"—have your processors examined," Ratchet shot back, narrowing his optics at the laser beam. The moment he began putting together his hastily improvised solution, the trembling stopped. "I've always suspected dexters wired theirs directly to their fuel tanks."
Optimus didn't answer. He did, however, ease his hold on the EM field that had been tightly drawn against his frame. Gentle, restless pulses cautiously brushed against Ratchet's own field as the medic secured strips of cybernite across the damaged abdominal section, building a temporary support frame that would brace the structures above and below the wound.
"Stop it." Ratchet caught, from the corner of his optic, Optimus attempting to force his right servo — still locked in ion cannon configuration — back into its normal form. "Don't waste your strength. The T-cog is damaged. Until I reset the support mounts, it isn't going anywhere."
He welded the final strip into place and waited nearly a minute for the heated metal to cool and lock solid.
While he waited, Ratchet quietly reconfigured his own systems. He redistributed mechanical load throughout his frame, dialed down the sensitivity of his sensor network, and locked the damaged knee stabilizer in place so it wouldn't give way once he had to carry the additional weight.
"Ready?" Moving around to the other side, Ratchet carefully ducked beneath Optimus's arm, settling the powerful — yet unnervingly cold — servo across his shoulders.
"Don't," Optimus whispered weakly. "I'm too… heavy for you. And your shoulders…"
"Uh-huh." Entirely unimpressed, Ratchet slid one arm beneath the Prime's back and the other under his knees. His internal display was already indicating that the booster system was primed, and a familiar warmth spread through his hydraulics. "You know three medics with their boosters engaged can lift a shuttle, right?"
"But you're alone…"
"And you're not a shuttle, you big, dumb war-built."
Optimus didn't answer. Instead, he rested his hand lightly on Ratchet's shoulder, careful not to press against the medic's scorched armor. Ratchet rose slowly, with painstaking care, making certain not to put any pressure on the damaged structures. The improvised brace held.
He controlled every movement to the millimeter. Slowly, he straightened to his full height, cradling the larger mech securely and with extraordinary care. Optimus let out a muffled groan through clenched dentas as Ratchet compensated for the extra weight, bringing his gyros into balance.
"Just hold on a little longer… I'll get you out of here."
Optimus lowered his helm until his cheek rested lightly against Ratchet's audial. And Ratchet started forward, dampening as much vibration from his actuators as he could. Every step was measured, as though he were walking across fragile glass. Beneath his vocoder, Optimus's Spark pulsed with a heavy, fever-warm rhythm that seemed to surround him from every direction.
"I could… walk," the Prime murmured, stubborn as ever.
"Just be quiet." Ratchet rolled his optics and drew the battered frame a little closer. "And try to vent more evenly."
Obediently, Optimus let his optics drift shut. He didn't say another word. It was simply too safe in Ratchet's arms to argue.