Disclaimer: I, in no way, shape, or form, own the Transformers© franchise or the characters it contains. All publicly recognizable characters are copyrighted to Hasbro, and the respective artists/writers/et cetera. No infringement intended.
Fandom: Transformers
Continuity: TF2k7 movie-verse, pre-earth, Cybertron
Characters: Ratchet, Ironhide
Summary: A small and tattered thing that, in a better world, might have been something more.
Warnings: Slash
Author's Note: Not sure how well this translates. Very tired. Will probably re-check in the morning (afternoon?) when sleep has been had. Criticism encouraged, technical points preferable.

I've got one friend, lying across from me
I did not choose him, he did not choose me
- 'Hospital Beds' by Cold War Kids

--

It had never been difficult to find Ratchet, post-skirmish, even in the early, heady days of war. One simply had to look past the recovered parts and pieces of fallen comrades, and it was a certainty that, not too far in the distance, a form would hunch, quiet and alone.

In the beginning, a few brave, foolish Sparks had tried to offer condolences, and commiserate in the sorrow, to mingle. It was their way, after all, one custom with which they distinguished themselves from their brutal counterparts, their traitor-kin. A relic of an era so recently departed that none could quite admit to it. Spark would speak to Spark, and words would not be necessary.

But always the gesture was rebuffed – with a look, a snarl, or, once, even a fist – and the medic was subsequently left to his self-imposed isolation. The others did not understand. Likely they could never begin to comprehend such seclusion, with their softness and sentimentality and glassy optics. Grief was not a burden to be borne alone, not in their culture. A pain could be shared, and thus lessened in communion, the burden spread to many Sparks. Why would a being choose to internalize his bereavement? Why would he choose to suffer so?

It was not mourning, per se; not something that could be readily shared with just anyone. It was never quite that simple. Ironhide understood it. Felt it in his own Spark despite the seemingly insurmountable distance of their rank and function, this kinship-in-horror. Had even found some small comfort in it.

In a better world, they would never have met.

Ironhide picked his way up the incline, despite the weariness that pulled at him, weaving a path up to the lonely perch the medic had chosen. He felt a few pitying optics turned in his direction, watery-blue lights slyly glinting from dark, broken corners, where strangers tangled tight together. What a fool, they silently called, clinging with desperate hope to this last threshold, to the cold comfort of shared fear. What a fool to hold himself so aloof.

Ironhide snorted dismissively, climbing higher, to that remote threshold just above the cold remnants of butchery, just below the tattered skyline. A place for ruined things.

Drawing to a halt behind the motionless Autobot, Ironhide thrust his chin up and folded his arms, half-challenging Ratchet to dare to turn him away. "Well?" He grumbled, all gruff bravado. "Are you going to move?"

Ratchet nodded absently, scooting forward by the minutest of margins. Ironhide took it as it was; it was as much a welcome as he would receive.

Seating himself carefully – though his patched and re-patched leg quivered in protest – he came to rest back to back with the medic, comfortable with the proximity. He stared out over the husks of the dead city, the crumbling, soot-shrouded walls and the grey, scarred towers that rose like cracked and jagged teeth above them. The smoke-streaked sky – that had once been so clear and bright – had soured to an unappealing grey-brown; only the brightest of stars able to fight through the choking smog to bathe Cybertron with their sickly, old light. The hunchbacked ruins of all that had been in his world; proud and beautiful Iacon, broken down to scrap and metal.

His gaze dropped from the firmament, back down to the desolate place that could no longer quite be called 'home'. The unit he and Prime had joined milled aimlessly, dwarfed by the wreckage of their lives. Each individual was a bright speck of color, vibrancy that seemed to strike so gaudily against the neutral grey of the debris. The streets were strewn with rubble and ruin, and, somewhere, the husks of those deluded enough to have thought themselves safe in their homes.

Ironhide had not been in the metropolis, unlike Ratchet and the other survivors he had merged with – it had been his place to stand beside Prime, on the frontlines, with shock troopers and what passed for warriors among their number. To fight, to stand, to die in service to his remaining kin – that had always been his function, his fate. Yet he had turned, fled with the others, in fear and shame, as they always did.

He wondered if those caught behind the retreat had time to scream, to know the terror of looming extinguishment, before the first incendiary round had struck, before the Decepticons had finally broken through. Had they tried to flee in the confusion that followed? Had they been cut down immediately, or did their traitor-kin play with them first?

Ratchet would probably know; he had been in the thick of it, removed to supposed safety with the other medics and technicians. He was the only other medic Ironhide had encountered since their regrouping. It was not difficult to work out what had happened to the others, though he wondered when and where they had been lost.

But he did not ask, and for a time, they rested in silence.

"Are you injured?" Ratchet asked, without turning.

"No," Ironhide lied smoothly, half-consciously putting a hand over the shattered scrap that had once been his secondary hip strut. "I was with Optimus. We were well fortified." Meaning, of course, they had taken cover behind the most dismal, useless piece of scrap Prime could find on such short notice.

Ratchet nodded like he expected it, already knew it to be false, and graced Ironhide with a cursory once-over with his scanners despite the half-grumbled protest. "Hn. The vanguard?"

Ironhide grimaced, clenched his fingers tight, regretted every step taken to get here. "Broken." Wished for a clean shot to the Spark and ebbing consciousness and so traitorously, guiltily glad he was here.

Iacon's defense had been a token gesture, it seemed; even with Lord Megatron long since departed to places unknown, the Decepticons had swept aside their hodgepodge resistance as if it were a mere afterthought. It was only through the impartial hand of luck and providential happenstance that Ironhide had survived at all. He had become part of the panicked wave, falling back in timely order into the confines of crooked towers, and what scant safety there was to be found.

The last Autobot outpost.

There were rumors of an exodus, a desperate flight into the stars to scatter themselves hopelessly, to thwart assured extinguishment with a mad gambit across galaxies. Wouldn't it be infinitely worse than death to lose all contact with their people, to sever their only connection to their culture and their heritage? It stunk of cowardice to abandon Cybertron, to desert their home like craven off-worlders, xenophiles, to chase ghost signals and snatched hope across the void.

Better to stand to the last mechanism. Better to die trying.

Ironhide shifted, absently pawing his left arm cannon. "Get on with it, then," he rumbled, tired of the empty conversation and soldier's thoughts.

There was only the barest hesitation.

"One wire," said Ratchet, his voice a terse rasp, all crisp equanimity. "The last came down to one wire." He held the evidence aloft, twirling the misshapen plastic between his fingertips. It was an ugly thing; twisted and broken and pock-marked by heat.

It seemed a small thing to hang a life by.

"Stupid of me not to notice. Probably should have known better," The medic hummed with a blank objectivity too casually impersonal to be honest. All professional disassociation, he continued, "I initially believed his concussion-cannon had overheated and backfired, combusting the remaining rounds. At a glance, it looked worse than what it was. Normally the slag would have welded the circuitry together, requiring extensive replacements." He paused, awkwardly, and leaned more of his weight against the solidness of Ironhide's back. "The Decepticons were pushing forward; I didn't think I had the time to drag him back when we were in full retreat already. And policy…" he stopped again, toed a piece of scrap between his feet. War had left no place for softer sentiments. "In any case, I found the body, later. His Spark had already extinguished, obviously; I checked for the definitive cause while dismantling him for parts, thinking my first assessment had been the right of it. It was only a bad back-feed, really; all I would have had to do to get him up and mobile again would be to replace a few connections."

Ironhide did not respond beyond the slightest huff; did not reach out with his being to touch upon Ratchet's dampened Spark energy in sympathy, as he would have with any other mechanism. It would not be a kindness, and would only harm where he had meant to help.

Ratchet had seemed so aggressively private, even at the best of times in those first, frantic days, when they had falteringly come together; the relentless war had only served to further introvert him, it seemed, withdraw him completely from the communion of his fellows. Perhaps it had attracted him to the equally aloof Ironhide, the last standing of the noble line of Sentinels, who seemed so very much above such it all. Prime-guard, an idealistic vision of steadfast loyalty; unbreakable, untouched.

Whereas Ratchet was fallible, fragile; his illusions shattered in the face of all he had witnessed. Diminished, it seemed, by all their loss.

Perhaps it was harder to bear because of his designated function – sharing the wrenching loss of Sparks being torn from the collective, the sickening lurch of going offline – or perhaps merely a selfish preservation instinct.

Or maybe protocol was easier to justify, rationalize, when he didn't have to feel so very much.

And so Ironhide allowed him this sparse comfort, and let the medic break himself upon the rocky shores of his silence.

Without changing his inflection, Ratchet began to recount his mistakes, detail every little personal failing. The looping evaluation of every action, or inaction, each one adding their weight to his shoulders, crushing him slowly. The light-built Praxian that – despite some hasty work and brilliant improvisation – had lost most of his processing capacity along with half his face. The battle-rattled gunner that had been torn nearly in half between two gleeful Decepticons, while Ratchet and the rest of his patrol hid silent and still and scared witless in a cradle of debris. Some nameless mechanism who had sat quietly aside as his Spark had guttered out from trauma, extinguishing before Ratchet had even thought to aid him, had even known he was dying. The grizzled veteran from the first city to fall – Altihex – and his lost arm that, even now, rested in some distant part of that dead city, and the poorly done, hasty repair job that had not been enough to block a direct blow from a Guardian's claws. Every ill-fated Spark abandoned on the field of combat; every fool or hero he had left behind.

And then he stopped, something stuttering and clanking deep in his chest, vocalizer whirring with something a little more desperate than bare static. Ratchet hesitated, rubbed at his knee, pulled himself back together one piece at a time. Choked out what was likely meant to be interpreted as a chuckle.

It sounded like the wheezing edge of a sob.

"It always comes down to something small, doesn't it? Some little thing that you barely even notice that ends up undoing everything." He twisted about, the bulk of him still relying on Ironhide to bolster him up. "It's more common than you would expect," He grumbled, with a pointed look towards the Sentinel's often-repaired artillery. "You should let me look at those."

"I'll let you look when it's a problem," Ironhide replied curtly, putting a defensive hand over the impressive military hardware.

"It's a problem now," Ratchet snapped, making a uncommitted grab for the bulky cannon. "You're at least halfway into the scrap heap as it is. You may as well have one part that functions as it's meant to."

Ironhide mouth components twitched with a pained grimace, though he knew Ratchet wouldn't see it. With his usual surliness, he growled, "Works fine, feels fine," and yanked himself free from Ratchet's lackluster hold. Thought of bullet holes and quiet, dignified extinguishment on anonymous battlefields.

In a better world…

"You limp, Ironhide."

They never would have met.

"I do not."

Small pang at the thought. Pained, frail, lost again in the tired ache that suffused his being, the only thing that told him he was still holding together.

"You favor your left side. It lags."

"Lead with my right."

"Feh. You're going to get yourself—" A long pause, thick with apprehension. "I wish you'd just stop being so fragging stubborn."

Somewhere in the broken city a sputtering, fragile glow struggled, the last mindless surge of life from a dead world. It might have been, once, a promise that there was still an end to find in this, still room for such a stupid, specious thing as hope.

Not when everything hinged on ramshackle faith, and unthinking, mechanical dogma. Not when they had so little left to lose.

"Mmph," Ironhide grunted ambiguously, staring at nothing in particular, as Ratchet finally buckled under the strain of isolation, and reached out. Spark energy flared, brushed hesitantly, wretchedly, at Ironhide's own, testing the emotional landscape of the Sentinel. Finding no treacherous edges, Ratchet let their auras sink together – a grasping, empty echo of lost things and a culture dead before its time. He poured out his directionless anger and his shame and the senselessness of it all, Spark sputtering, bright and terrible against Ironhide's aura. Flashing sensation-images, half-thoughts, showing where words had failed him, extolling his failures, his lessons learnt. His hate for the restrictions of his function in wartime; his very core of being rebelling against this new and ghastly modus operandi imposed upon him; the pain of necessity. Clutched at soldier's things, skirting along the edge of his dread and the frayed remains of Ironhide's pride, knitting together the fractures as best he could.

A little thing to hang a life by.

And on it went, this meaningless gesture that had, inexplicably, become so important, until – weary from the retelling of the same old story – they let go, retreating into the safer ache of isolation. Ratchet sagged back against Ironhide's back, hollowed of feeling, at least for a little while, for long enough. The bleak silence spread out from them as the contact faded, the strange and new and terribly familiar sensation of alone sinking around them like a shroud.

Ratchet's hand fumbled, hunting through the scrap and the debris, and obligingly, Ironhide shifted to grasp his searching fingers, squeezing them.

"Thank you," Ratchet rasped, not moving from his slumped position. He sighed, head lolling, and slipped into a restless, twitching recharge, optics black as any dead mech.

Ironhide nodded, and said nothing.

And, somewhere far away, a light went out.