Ep1.5 - Crash - Closed

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Optimus was familiar with dying.

He was accustomed to it, in a way. The necessary brutality of war had brought him to the brink more than a few times in four-million years and the cold rush of permanent shut down raced up to catch him with an almost routine viciousness. That did not necessarily mean that he was used to dying. The dread was still there. Staggering, half dragged, half carried to Medbay very nearly killed him. The spark-stopping agony of every step threatening to send him into to full system crash. When Bumblebee and Ratchet finally managed him onto the medical slab, suddenly lying down did kill him. For about ten seconds according to his internal-chronometer.

He came back in a considerable amount of pain.

“What do I do?” Bumblebee’s voice seemed to filter down through his sensor grid on a lag, syllables dragging on and on. Somewhere on his left, he felt the scout’s EM field coast across the edge of his awareness, a flicker of yellow and a frission of panic. Dimly, he thought he should do something about that, but he felt unbelievably heavy just then. His eyes kept drifting shut, optics rebooting, static in his HUD. Pieces of conversation flaking through his awareness. “- is really bad isn’t it? Is he gonna –” Nothing. Static. His spark seized in his chest and he forgot how to think. “ – can’t stop this bleed. Ratchet!”

He felt someone’s hands inside his abdominal armor, holding something shut. That hurt. A lot.

“Ratchet…?” He could taste energon and motor oil. That’s usually what dying tasted like. “Where is…Max?”




[[OOC: For Neko and Ratchet. ]]

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Ratchet was swearing, a barely audible buzz hissed deep in his vocalizer, hundreds of phrases in dozens of languages that were less about the profanity - half of them couldn't even be translated properly into Cybertronian - and more along the lines of a mantra. A meditative chant that kept the one processor thread he allowed for panic under pressure occupied while every molecule of his frame and modicrum of skill was bent on doing his job.

Preserving life. Specifically their Prime's, who was draining out, energon and oil turning ragged edges of metal slick, as his spark guttered beneath Ratchet's hands.

The mantra of obscenity only paused in order to snap directions at the other pair of hands available - unfair to Bee, perhaps, but fairness took a negative ticket number in the queue when there was a mechanism bleeding out on Ratchet's medberth. "Hold it!" he snarled to Bee's frantically clicked query. He spared a nanoklik to grab the younger mech's hands, shoving them where he needed them inside the ruin of Optimus' chassis to apply pressure over a split cluster of fluid lines. "THERE, hold that. Harder, slag it! I don't care if you're crushing it, just HOLD IT!"

Triage was all about rating what was the most dangerous to a patient's life and taking care of the vital above the merely ruinous or crippling. Ratchet's scans were feeding back a list of urgently flashing things in lurid hues, with three more taking the place of every item he could check off. Bumblebee was saying something but provided the mech's hands stayed where Ratchet had put them, fluids seeping out from between his fingers at a slightly less alarming rate then they had before, the medic simply didn't have time to parse the sound. Broken plates and shattered struts rated below severed fluid lines, draining lines rated below the volatile spark of charge systems ripped open and stalling, and ALL of it rated beneath the miniscule sliver of sparklight that he had his hands cupped over, micro tools bristling in a rippling carpet of endless motion around the hairline crack of the spark casing.

Cybertronians didn't sweat, not even bullets, but he could feel a certain affinity for the human phrasing in moments like these.

Which was, of course, the moment when his patient decided that online was somehow better than offline during extremely delicate repair work where a single flinch could be disastrous. Ratchet had already cut every motor function of the large frame and he reached automatically to cut processor function as well - would have but it was Prime, the biggest glitch of them all, and instead the swearing reached audible levels as Ratchet partitioned off another sliver of processing power to deal with his most intractable patient. "For the love of Primus - he's in surgery, so are you, SHUT UP!"

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If Optimus had a response it was swallowed very immediately by a surge of pain – crippling and absolute terminating out from his laser-core and burning the world white. Ratchet had taken his hydraulics offline to keep him from thrashing, the correct action in this instance. Had he been in possession of full motor-control the blinding tear of agony would have snapped his head back against the berth, bucked his spine, and likely torn his inside futher agape. As it was, he lay paralyzed and immobile as the pain rushed from the nexus of his spark, set the wire-work of his nervous system on fire and for a moment the universe blanked out as his sensory grid overloaded and shorted out entirely.

He heard himself screaming.

Distantly, through the cold numbness of system shortage, he could hear Bumblebee shouting very loudly over his commander. Though the bands of static striping his eyes he could see the scout – splattered in blue and coolant, the neon shine of his optics in the bunker over-head lights. Every light source seemed blinding. Pressure in his lower abdomen, a spine-curling scraping sensation of metal grinding metal. Bumblebee’s hands buried in his plating, holding some hemorrhaging line shut. Roll of error code jammed his high processes, striping every function down to repair. A stasis lock countdown was already flashing through his neural net.

‘Ratchet! I’m holding it, but he’s bleeding into his laser core!’

Optimus was sliding out of consciousness. Ratchet’s face was a blur – erratically illuminated by what he knew was the light from his own spark – shining though his ruptured casing, through the gold cage of the Matrix embedded over it. He wondered, vaguely if it was getting in the damn way. Another jolt of pain. Prime groaned, systems shutting down – lights slowing going out through every inch of him. He couldn’t tell if it was Ratchet or the damage or both. His vision cut out. Then his vocoder. He couldn’t tell if it was Ratchet or… the damage taking him down.

//Ratchet?//

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The scary thing was not so much the swearing - swearing was a known and quantifiable gauge of Ratchet's temper or frustration level. The frightening thing was when the swearing stopped and Ratchet knew it, could hear and feel Bumblebee's flare of alarm, but he didn't have TIME. There wasn't a processing thread to spare for the younger mech's comfort, not when he was plugged in and dealing with a deluge - an entire damned ocean or five - worth of critical screaming errors.

There wasn't really processing room left over for any kind of patient bedside manner care either, but Ratchet wasn't so far gone down the path of necessity over professionalism as to leave a patient screaming on the berth the way some 'Con surgeons were rumored to. Particularly not when seizing arcs of pain lit up MORE errors like flare fire in Ratchet's own head, making the critical errors even harder to pinpoint. Necessity and professionalism thankfully aligned on that note, saving him from having to choose, and he sliced through the Prime's systems with surgical code blocks, taking sensor feed and all auxiliary systems offline in huge chunks.

It afforded Ratchet the barest of respites, enough to start tracking and prioritizing critical errors. Enough to deploy suction and barriers to keep spark and core from being flooded, enough to bark at Bumblebee where the clamps were and to start using them. It gave him just enough room to open a comm channel and light Steeljaw's comm lines on fire with orders to recall Dusk from patrol now now NOW, Ratchet needed the other medic in medbay ten kliks ago, bridge him back NOW!

It also gave him just enough circuits left over - because Optimus, damn him, was clinging to awareness with a stubborn tenacity - to ping a brusque signal back to the mech who would have been far better off safely oblivious. //Busy-not now-SAFE-shut up and LET ME WORK//