Ep 1.5 Visiting Hours (Closed)

[Deleted]

Ratchet worked swiftly, his fingers sure. By the time Wheeljack lay back onto the berth he had already unspooled a length of hard cable from beneath one of the monitors and held it looped in his hand.

"I'm sure I don't need to tell you that one hundred vorn is a long time," he said bluntly. "I won't spin a lie to reassure you - a lot could have been done over that period. Medically, I mean. Or in the name of whatever proxy science Shockwaves practices in the absence of proper surgery. That so much of your memory is missing suggests that he wished to conceal something - and yet my scan picked up no alteration to your frame that deviated from your last on-file specs. Hm."

Wheeljack would feel a light pressure at the base of his helm, at the back of his neck. Two fingers touched and released a small latch there, revealing the data port concealed beneath. Ratchet stepped back to the monitors and disappeared from his line of sight.

"All right, plugging in now," said the medic. "Stand by. Try not to upset my handshake protocols, please. I hope you haven't upgraded your firewalls to attack on sight as well."

An instant later the connection was made. A stream of queries flooded to the access point of his neural net, seeking permission to interrogate his data banks.

Somewhere behind him, Ratchet was speaking again.

"Upon waking in Crystal City, did you notice any signs of physical damage or alterations to your frame or core biomechanics? Any obvious signs of tampering?"

[Deleted]

Wheeljack snorted. "Preaching to the converted doc. Those patrol that found me, they had lots of stories of the other poor slaggers who made it out. Insanity and death was a reoccurring theme."

"Far as we could tell, my frame wasn't what he was interested in," Wheeljack rolled his shoulders in a small shrug. "There were the excision scars all under my armour but what they were for...never did figure them out. Frag, for all I know, maybe Shockers just got bored one day and decided to test how sharp his knives were or something."

Wheeljack didn't wince as Ratchet opened his dataport and inserted the cable into the back of his neck. His attention had been completely diverted inside to taming his suddenly rampaging firewalls which were all suddenly blaring with threat! Threat! Threat! Invasion! Destroy!

He curbed them before they could demolish the handshake protocols. Wheeljack regarding the scanner's request for deeper access to his processor for several long moments. It was crazy, just how deeply this had affected him. Wheeljack couldn't even remember whatever it was that Shockwave had done to him. But his frame remembered what he couldn't.

He hated it.

Wheeljack prided himself on his composure and his ability to keep calm under the most dire of situations. But this little trip down to the med-bay had blindsided him and sent him flailing helplessly as he struggled to get his own confused, conflicted impulses under control. Wheeljack didn't appreciate being dictated to by his fears, he controlled them, not the other way around.

The Wrecker gave a long exvent. Then he approved the request, allowing Ratchet's equipment through his firewalls and deeper into his processor. He 'watched' as strings of code snaked their way inside his neural net, seeking out and examining just about everything, cataloguing diagnostic reports, scanning damaged sectors of maligned coding. The Wrecker kept his distance despite every instinct of his to crush it and get it out of his processor. His servos itched with the urge to yank the cable from his neck.

It made him twitchy (twitchy was an understatement but for the sake of Wheeljack's ego, twitchy was what he was going with). One servo flicked up before he curled it into a fist and forced it back to his side. The sensation was in no way unpleasant, just…a deep sense of unease gripped Wheeljack at his spark. His blue optics stared blankly up at the ceiling, Wheeljack's mind was completely focused on what was happening on the inside.

The scanning software probed deeper. Wheeljack's core processor was in relatively good shape. For the most part, everything was in working order but there were particular sectors that showed signs of damage. These were all protocols related to his memory core. They governed how it was accessed and how it integrated and interacted with the rest of his processer. Here, amongst the healthy code, there were patches of corrupted subroutines. The damage was old, Wheeljack's processor had simply built workarounds to overcome the defective code strings.

Then it hit his memory core.

Here, the corruption was overwhelmingly obvious. The entire infrastructure was damaged, down to the basic machine coding that made up the core. If Wheeljack's memory core was a bookcase, then someone had come through, ripped out all the books and shredded most of them before dumping them to the floor and beating the bookshelf itself with a hammer. Carefully, they'd all been put back together, in the right order but the contents of his memories had been permanently damaged. Meta-data had been completely severed, the timestamps were the only pieces that he'd managed to retain. He was extremely fortunate that the timestamps hadn't been lost. Without them, Wheeljack would have never been able to have manually re-arranged his memories back together, retrieving them from where they had been scattered throughout the rest of his processor.

But without the meta data, his recall was dulled, blurred. A Cybertronian memory file was more than just audial and visual data, they were tagged and deeply tiered to both the emotion centre and thought process/logic trees. But those linkages had been lost for Wheeljack, reducing the damaged memories to their most basic components.

For the period where he had to have been imprisoned, those memories were completely missing, leaving a large gap in the timestamps with no explanation. Of the totality of his life prior his awakening in Crystal city, only a relatively small number of them were undamaged. These were of his life just prior to the hole, his time with the Wreckers. Anything before that, the meta-data degradation started setting in, even blurring earlier events of the war. The damage was most severe at the beginning of his life, turning his memory of his cohort into a distant dream. That he'd come through retaining his engineering skills was more a testament to spark given talent than luck.

The scanning program took in all this and more, detailing it all in a report summarizing its findings that it would send back to Ratchet. As the scan continued on, Wheeljack's attention drifted, skittering away as if both his processor and frame were no longer his concern. He was only half aware of himself, the other half had simply fallen into a blank stupor, no longer responding to the external world or his own internal processes.

It would take little to break him out of this state. But where Wheeljack would be mentally was another matter altogether.

[Deleted]

Ratchet said nothing throughout the procedure, his attention fixed upon the monitors.

He stood at the head of the berth, one hand resting on Wheeljack’s shoulder. He hummed absently to himself as he watched the scan results file across one of the screens. It wasn’t a Cybertronia tune; picked up from Raf or Miko, perhaps. The medic was frowning, his brow furrowed. Whatever he saw in the lines of ruined code, he clearly did not like.

When the scan hit Wheeljack’s memory core and revealed the cruelly scattered remains, Ratchet scowled.

“This is vile,” he said in disgust. “I would ask who would commit such an act of pointless cruelty, but the answer to that has already been made abundantly clear. If he had merely obliterated your memories of your imprisonment, that at least I could rationally comprehend. But why inflict such damage upon your earlier memory files? Why remove emotional connection to moments unrelated to the war? It makes little sense. Hm.”

Ratchet tapped a screen, seemingly unaware that Wheeljack’s attention was fading.

“I may need to consult with Dusk on this,” he said. “He is a far more more familiar with glitched or damaged coding than I am, hrmph. In the meantime I’m afraid I’m going to have to request that you remain here under observation for the rest of the da– Wheeljack?”

The hand on his shoulder shook him, gruffly.

“Wheeljack? Wheeljack, are you even listening?”

[Deleted]

Ratchet's words washed over Wheeljack without notice. With his memories missing of his time in Shockwave's servos, Wheeljack couldn't fall into a flashback. However, he was more than capable of simply blanking out into nothing and abandoning his frame to automatic processes. In which case, Ratchet's servo shaking his shoulder whilst something was plugged into him and inside his processor brought every self defence protocol online. Wheeljack might have warned Ratchet about his blades but he'd forgotten to remind the medic that even without them, he was more than capable of dealing out a large amount of damage.

One servo lashed out, grabbing Ratchet's hand on his shoulder and crushing it within Wheeljack's grip. The other curled into a fist, ready for when the Wrecker yanked the medic towards him. He slugged Ratchet hard in the gut. Then, while the medic was doubled over, Wheeljack rolled off the medberth and to his pedes. The cable connected to him was yanked out at this movement. The next instant, Wheeljack had thrown himself forward and body slammed Ratchet to the ground. Then, he was still.

What the-

The forced abortion of the processor scan was like a harsh jolt, bringing Wheeljack's mind back from whatever vacation it had gone on. It had also fragmented his most recent memories in his memory core, since this was the last place it had been examining. In a normal mech's processor, it was unlikely to have caused such damage but Wheeljack's memory core was damaged to the base level. The Wrecker's immediate focus was on recovering and defragmenting those files since he had no idea how he'd gone from standing in the medbay door to pinning Ratchet on the ground. It was almost incomprehensible that Ratchet had attacked him and there had to be a very good reason for this utterly baffling situation he was in. But until he knew otherwise, Wheeljack held no intentions of moving in case it did turn out that this was all justified.

[Deleted]

Ratchet barely had time to widen his optics before he found himself hurled to the floor, with a confused Wrecker on top of him.

They landed with a noisy clatter, propelled backwards by Wheeljack's charge. Ratchet was sputtering in shock and anger, his forearm raised in an attempt to grapple off another blow.

"Wheeljack!" he gasped. "Are you out of your mind?! What am I saying, of course you are. Get a hold of yourself!"

And then, since no one ever took his advice, the medic did so himself.

Moving fast, he grabbed both of Wheeljack's wrists and heaved. Though a medic, he had been in combat before, and was robust enough to push the Wrecker upwards, working a little space between their frames. His forearms shook with the effort, and Ratchet grit his jaw. With a desperate motion he brought up his foot and planted it solidly in the Wrecker's midriff before kicking outwards. The manoeuvre was strong enough to throw the other mech over backwards and off of him, towards the berth.

Wheezing, Ratchet clutched his abdomen and staggered to his feet, using a tool trolley behind him for leverage. He sagged against it and eyed the Wrecker warily.

"Well, that was not entirely unexpected," he rasped. "But decidedly unpleasant. Wheeljack! Are you back with us again? Or am I going to have to call for an orderly?"

[Deleted]

Wheeljack was so focused on tracking down those missing memory files, he was unaware of what Ratchet was up to until it was too late. He was been shoved off the medic, a kick thrown in there for good measure and propelled backwards to the berth. The Wrecker's quick reflexes saved him from a painful collision, he caught himself on the edge of the berth.

Irately, Wheeljack glared the medic. Messing around with his memory files was a delicate task and he couldn't do two things at once when he was trying to fix them. The re-indexing that had recovered his life had laid him flat out in a safe spot for a long time, with the occasional breaks for re-fueling. As far as Wheeljack could tell, he'd come down to the medbay in answer to Ratchet's call…then...nothing, till he'd woken up mid-attack. Attack? Maybe he'd been defending himself.

In Wheeljack's experience, none of these meant anything good. Though why Ratchet had done this to him or how he'd known...he couldn't understand. The Wrecker was too charged up to think further, as far as he was concerned, he was the victim here.

"Doc," he growled. "The frag is going on here? What did you-" A servo darted up to his back, only to discover his blades were missing. That Wheeljack had voluntarily laid down his swords did not occur to him, this was only another sign that something had happened here to him against his will.

Wheeljack's face tightened, so that's how it was, huh. "Better call for that orderly," the Wrecker hissed viciously, menacingly punching one fist into the other. "I don't know what you did to me but you're gonna need one when I'm through with you."

[Deleted]

Ratchet coughed, his hand still on his midriff.

“Wheeljack, are you off your nut?” he growled. “You were the one who attacked me. Do you think I’m hanging onto this trolley for fun? Moreover, I’m insulted that you think I would deliberately perform anything on a patient without their permission first. Have you forgotten that you were the one who agreed to submit to the scan in the first– oh. Oh ho.”

With a grimace Ratchet levered himself upright. The tool trolley clanked and he gripped it firmly, a shrewd optic on the Wrecker.

“That's alarming,” he said. “I had assumed you were reacting merely to the presence of the scan after being lulled into a near–stasis state – a defensive reflex. But could it be you don’t remember any of it, that something loose in that tin can of spare parts you call a processor has gone and rewritten the memory files – or worse, erased them? And stop punching your fists together,“ he added peevishly. “This is a medical bay, not a back alley of Kaon.”

[Deleted]

Wheeljack bristled defensively. Like he just would have blabbed about his little trip to Shockwave's lab to Ratchet. Agree to a processor scan. Pfft. With all the mental debating he'd previously done with himself temporarily erased, Wheeljack's gut reaction was complete distrust.

"Pull the other doc. Like I'd talk to you about something even Bulk-" The Wrecker's heated voice snapped off but it was too late to cover up that slip.

At the very least, Wheeljack was thinking a bit more clearly now. Admittedly, Ratchet would probably be the last Cybertronian to ever conduct unethical science experiments on his patients. But Wheeljack was finding it hard to believe he'd have simply agreed to let the medic to take a look at his head. Complete slag was his initial instinct.

Narrowing his optics suspiciously, Wheeljack raised one hand in warning as he delved back into his processor. "Gimme a nano-klik to finish defragging those files like I was trying to before you kicked me and we'll see," he growled. Thankfully, it didn't take long to retrieve them, it was a relatively short amount of time that had gone missing.

The Wrecker sagged, slumping out of his combat stance and settled back on the berth. Apparently, he had agreed to all of this. Wheeljack mulishly glanced at the medic in the corner of his optic. He had indeed attacked Ratchet. And his temporary amnesia was his own damn fault too.

"Relax, the scanner was still in my memory core when I pulled the cable. 'not a sign of a deeper problem, the last couple of kliks just got scrambled since the scanner wasn't properly ejected and well. You've seen what my memory core's like," Wheeljack's tone ran sour. It was clear he did not agree now with his past decisions that had brought them to this situation.

"Sorry 'bout the attack," he added in afterthought and deep reluctance. Wheeljack did not like to admit that he was wrong.

[Deleted]

“Yes, well,” grumbled Ratchet.

He straightened tentatively, shrugging one shoulder and then the other to relieve the tension that had built up in them. With a curt nod he patted his midriff and reluctantly said, “I suppose it is not entirely your fault. I should have better prepared myself for something like this to happen. No damage done, save to my connector.”

Ratchet stepped over to the slack cord lying forgotten on the floor. He picked it up and studied the connector pins mournfully, bent from the shock of being abruptly yanked from the port on Wheeljack’s neck. With a sigh the medic threw it on the berth.

“At least the majority of the scan data should be intact and uncorrupted,” he said. He crossed his arms and looked down at the Wrecker with a frown, his irritation seeping away. “But the fact remains that your memory core is like a sieve. Someone has certainly done their level best to mutilate certain pockets of your memories to their best ability. Which leaves you with a decision to make.”

He grimaced. “You can allow me to attempt to reconnect or patch what incomplete code segments I can, perhaps giving you back contextual and emotional access to at least some of the files. I won’t be able to return what memories have been forcefully erased, of course, but at least it will be something. Or, you can leave this as is and not risk any more damage brought about by further tampering.”

Ratchet regarded him soberly. “It’s up to you, Wheeljack. I’ll respect your decision either way.”

[Deleted]

Wheeljack contemplated the two options Ratchet was giving him. Do nothing and risk no further damage to his processor or try to recover some of his earlier life, with the possibility of making things worse.

Honestly, there wasn't even a decision to make here. Wheeljack had shut the door on his life in Crystal City long before he'd fallen into Shockwave's servos. He'd turned his back on his cohort, walked away from them millennia ago. No point in trying to regain the emotional meta data back again when they were all dead, anyway. It was easier this way, didn't need to mourn. The only family he had now were the Wreckers and he could remember them just fine.

"Only thing I'm interested in is whether or not Shockwave left some nasty surprises in my head that they didn't pick up on back on Cyebrtron," Wheeljack answered with a slight shrug. "Wouldn't want to turn out to be a sleeper agent after all this time. Don't really care much for those old memories."

Couldn't, anyway, because of the damage done to them. It was hard to care for something when all emotional attachment to it had been stripped away.

[Deleted]

True to his word, Ratchet merely nodded.

“Very well,” he said.

He glanced back at the monitors. “I believe I collected what data I require while the scan was still active. I’d like a day or two to go over the results in closer detail. I would assume that if anything potentially dangerous has been inserted into your base code, it will only be revealed by close scrutiny. If I find anything suspicious I will let you know. If you don't hear back from me over the next few days, assume that all is well.”

The medic sighed. “Until the next time you wind up in here, at least. Try to pace yourself please.”

But Ratchet clapped a hand briefly over the Wrecker’s shoulder and offered him a grim and fleeting smile to soften the words before stepping back again, his hands on his hips. “Now, do you have any questions or concerns? Is there anything you haven’t told me yet in regards to your time with Shockwaves? If so, now is the time to say it. If not, I should get to scanning this code straightaway.”

[Deleted]

"Don't worry doc," Wheeljack replied dryly. "Told you, your standards need adjusting. I'm the most moderate bot about."

The Wrecker's blue optics narrowed as he went over what he'd shared with the medic, trying to see if he'd missed anything. "Nothing's coming to mind at the moment. If there's anything that comes up, I'll let you know." Wheeljack started walking towards the door. He halted, servo on the door frame as something occurred to him before turning his head back to Ratchet. "Doc…don't tell Bulk. No matter what."

With that, he slipped from the med-bay. Bulkhead was...well. One of the reasons he'd struck out on his own. Wheeljack wasn't sure if his old friend knew that or not. But he didn't want the ol' lugnut to feel even the slightest bit responsible for the mess Wheeljack had gotten himself into. It was his to deal with and his alone.

The Wrecker's gaze quickly fell upon Fort Max, waiting outside with his blades. "I live," he commented drolly. Wheeljack nodded at his swords. "'n so does Ratchet. Thanks for holding onto those."

[Deleted]

Maximus waited patiently in the control room, just outside the medbay doors.

The control room was empty, a peaceful well of silence. Only the monitors glowed with life. Maximus was leaned up against the wall, as quiet and still as a statue. His manner was of one who had nowhere better to go, and was content to wait. Wheeljack's blades lay in one of his hands, like knives in his grip.

When the Wrecker emerged the big mech turned his head to look at him, then pushed himself off the wall.

"No problem," he said. "Didn't think you'd want them to go far."

He held the swords, hilt first. The blades lay across his palm, handled with respect for their lethality. Maximus' expression was neutral but he spoke quietly and his words were chosen with care, with no indication of just what he might have heard from his station outside the medbay's doors. His gaze remained on Wheeljack's face.

"Everything all right in there?"

[Deleted]

Wheeljack took his swords carefully from Fortress Maximus's grasp, a swell of relief spreading through him as he reclaimed them. It never felt quite right to be apart from them for too long. At Fort Max's question, the Wrecker tilted his head aside, optics darted quickly back to the med-bay door before meeting Fort Max's gaze.

It was only because the control room was vacant but for the two of them did Wheeljack feel comfortable enough to lower some of his barriers. He relaxed his shoulders, releasing the tension in them. The metal on his back drooped slightly as he tiredly scrubbed his face.

"Yeah," he answered honestly. "Just...acknowledging some old demons. Hopefully the doc bot will be able to lay them to rest and give me a few answers."

[Deleted]

Maximus stepped back and clasped his hands together behind his back, assuming a loose parade stance. He pursed his mouth and nodded once, gravely. The big mech was all too aware of how one's personal horrors could rise to haunt them, particularly when they were placed under scrutiny.

"Yeah," he said. "I get it. Don't worry. The doctor is good at addressing those kinds of problems. He'll sort 'em out, or do his best trying. Best thing is to not dwell on it in the meantime."

He paused, then jerked his head in the direction of the corridor that lead off to the rest of the base.

"I've got monitor duty in twenty minutes, but I was going to get a quick drink before then," he said. "Want one?"