Chapter Text
Ratchet had been careful to take a circuitous route to his apartments. He took a different route every time, often looping back and spending time in shops with multiple entrances. There were quite a few ways into Rodion proper, and Ratchet tried to be unpredictable about which ones he used. He knew the Dead End lookouts would mention it if they'd noticed someone new skulking around, but it didn't hurt to be vigilant.
He didn't assume he was safe in the shinier parts of the city, either. He had the Anti-Vocationist League's crowdsourced map of Functionary patrols up on his HUD, and he kept to back streets and alleys until he got to the staff residences. A careful application of high-grade along the vents at his sides—where it would vaporise from the warmth of his engines—made him smell like he'd been out doing something that wasn't completely illegal. Irresponsible, perhaps, but he was hardly the only one getting fendered these days.
He tapped in the code to his door and stepped in. It was dark and cool inside, the furniture gleaming dully in neons from the half-shuttered window. It really was a nice set of rooms, complete with a padded recharge slab and on-demand hot solvent; a pity that he barely used them.
A pair of optics lit up in the darkness, and Ratchet nearly stalled from surprise.
"Ratch?" called a voice, thready and faint. "That you?"
Pharma? What was he doing here? Ratchet walked over to the wall and groped for the light switch. The ceiling lamp bloomed slowly into full brightness, revealing Pharma perched on the couch and peering owlishly at him. "Not likely to be anybody else, is it?" asked Ratchet, by way of hello.
Pharma glared, managing to look both scolding and pathetic. There was something almost haggard about his appearance, like he'd skipped his weekly soak and polish. Ratchet gave him a once-over with his remote diagnostic suite and found nothing. Not that he'd expected to find anything, exactly—Pharma wouldn't visit him if he was sick —but what were the alternatives? He'd dropped the accent, so this wasn't about work. Ratchet knew he didn't like asking for favours, either.
He kept his tone light. "What brings you here?" The last time Pharma had visited, it was about asking him to present at a medical conference. "If this is about the Iaconian Iatric Association, you know I'm on their blacklist for trying to hit Froid with a chair." Flippant hyperbole. He knew this wasn't an invitation. (And he'd tried to fistfight Froid, no chairs involved. Still blacklisted, though.)
Pharma stared at him, then wrinkled his nose. "I can't believe you're drunk. Was that why you were late? Because you were busy soaking in engex? You'll pickle your filters." The comment lacked any bite; his voice trembled over compound glyphs, and his pitch fluctuated wildly for a split second at the end. Ratchet stepped closer, concerned. He could see the pale platelets around Pharma's optics were scorched, and the slats in his shoulder vents were twitching slightly. Something really was wrong, and Pharma was trying his best to hide how it was affecting him.
"Just the thing to cap off a long day at work," said Ratchet, gesturing vaguely. He changed gears. "But you're not here to lecture me about my drinking habits. What is it, you lost a promotion? That gearstick Anodyne giving you the dead shifts again?" But his tone was warm—it was meant to be a gentle enquiry. They weren't as close as they'd been during their trainee days, but he still considered Pharma a friend. One from his life as a doctor, sure, but still someone he valued. Perhaps less than he deserved.
Pharma, usually so full of words, just rubbed at his eyes and handed him a datapad from his subspace.
Ratchet scanned it, his tank turning in on itself the longer he read. It was a summons from the Council, scheduling Pharma for a 're-evaluation': a blatantly coded term for revoking the individual alt-mode exemption that marked him as a member of the intellectual class—and let him work as a medic. It was ridiculous that he even needed an exemption—there was nobody in the history of the Academy with his scores!—but the Council apparently couldn't see past his wings.
It made no sense. It made no sense. Pharma had done everything he could have possibly done to secure his position. He'd been exceptional in medical school, brilliant and stubborn and inventive, backed it up with finely honed skill—and that should've been enough, but of course it wasn't. Ratchet had expected him to be bitter about it, about Ratchet getting to be Nominus' personal medic—still a Prime, even if he was deeply exasperating—but Pharma had been nothing but supportive. He'd eagerly accompanied Ratchet to every party, to every political soirée, his effusive plus-one happy to hang on Ratchet's arm and say the right things… and there he'd built the connections he knew he'd need eventually.
It was downright astute. When the Functionists took over, his association with Nominus rapidly became a black stain on Ratchet's record, and he'd learnt fast to keep his head down and go unnoticed. Pharma, meanwhile, got on better terms with Cybertron's rich and powerful. Wrote his own accent-language programming, sought to blend in and make himself useful without stepping on their toes — and they got him a position among the intellectual class of Cybertron, alt-mode exempt.
Functionism had treated flightframes ruthlessly since the era of the Primes. Ratchet had seen the trouble poor Jetfire had faced before he'd found his way to the League. He couldn't fault the tactic Pharma had chosen, despite the risk involved with being so visible. The Taxonomy saw Ratchet as military-adjacent—while he still worked in a civilian position, his heavy plating got him classed as mobile medical equipment, and he got overlooked by the Functionists because of it. Pharma'd had had no such luck. Everything he'd done had been to protect himself, and it had worked, too, for a very long time. Hadn't he once been primary surgeon to one of the Twelve? That should've made him untouchable. It should have protected him from this.
Who'd you piss off, Pharma, thought Ratchet, not without sympathy. "You're planning to contest this, right?" The answer didn't matter. He wouldn't—couldn't—leave Pharma to the tender mercies of the Functionists. And they were moving fast, too, with the re-eval scheduled a tenday after the summons had been first sent—five days ago. He checked the virtual signature on the summons, just in case; it was spark-sinkingly genuine. "We could build a good case. Get someone from Deltaran to gather signatures. Perhaps we could—"
"What's the point?"
Ratchet looked up from the datapad, surprised, but Pharma wouldn't meet his eyes. He sounded… tired. Fragile. Like he'd given up. And something about that felt indescribably wrong to Ratchet. He'd always known Pharma to be unshakeably stubborn about everything—budget allocations, experimental treatments, research opportunities for those harried-looking trainees of his—but it looked like this had already crushed some essential part of him.
"I've done everything I can," said Pharma, hollowly. "I've been all over the place trying to talk to anyone who'll listen. Subcouncillor Avitus was happy enough to have me hand-clean his slagged-up stinking filters—and he wouldn't look at me twice." His face twisted, and his winglets juddered agitatedly. "Just said something about the bloody will of Adaptus. None of the other subcouncillors would see me, and I waited for so long I—I lost track of time." His shoulder vents released a stream of heated air. "I tried grovelling, but they just had the enforcers throw me out."
"You've never grovelled in your life," said Ratchet, sitting down next to Pharma. "Would you know where to start?"
Pharma glanced at him, sputtering out a laugh like he hadn't thought he'd be able to. It was good to see a smile on his face, weak as it was. With the way he was curled up on the couch, deportment subroutines dropped for a friend… they could've been back at the Academy together; Pharma perhaps upset at not getting radioactive stains right the first time around, Ratchet gently encouraging him to try again, really, everyone mucks up their first rad-stain, it's practically a rite of passage…
Suspicion began to bloom in his mind, an ugly crystal growth sticking sharp edges into his thoughts. Why was Pharma here? Ever-punctual, ever-perfect about timing; what did he mean, he'd lost track of time when he'd gone to see the subcouncillors? Perhaps it had just been a turn of phrase, except… he hadn't used the subglyphs that'd mark it as such. He'd meant it quite literally.
The temperature of the room seemed to dip slightly. Ratchet could feel the Council's eyes on him, keen and malevolent. Could Pharma have brought them here? Were they using him to get to Ratchet—and the League? Or was he just overanalysing words spoken in distress?
Working with the League had taught him the importance of acting for the camera until he knew exactly what was going on. "You sure about giving up?" asked Ratchet, placing a hand on Pharma's arm, passing the datapad back to him. "There's still four days left. And they might let you stay a medic, you don't know." The words felt like gutterslime in his mouth.
"Look at me, Ratchet. I'm too small to be a medevac plane, too low-powered to be a first responder." He rubbed at his optics with his free hand. "They're probably going to make me a bloody data courier because I'm fast."
No, they're not, thought Ratchet, looking sadly at him. Information storage alts of any kind had their days numbered. Pharma didn't know about all the data sticks hidden away under the protection of the AVL. They'd had to stay within range of the League's signal jammers until Ratchet and the other available medics could manually remove their obsolescence chips and backups. The poor things had all been miserable and fatalistic until then—Ratchet had thought that was an obvious side effect of having a bomb in your head, but Flatline had been of the opinion that obs-chips altered thought patterns. Made the victim less likely to fight back.
He hadn't taken the idea seriously at the time, but given what Pharma was saying, how quickly he'd given up… could it be true? A failsafe built into the obs-chips made them self-destruct upon removal, so they'd never been able to verify its capabilities.
Or perhaps—and more likely—Pharma was asking for help, in the most oblique way he could. Ratchet took special care to separate his work for the AVL from his boring, unexceptional life as a medic, but he knew there were still rumours— about the kind of people he associated with, and used to associate with. Orion Pax had very visibly changed sides, after all, and Ratchet was well-known as Orion's friend. Perhaps Pharma knew that, and he was asking Ratchet to help him.
He'd have to move very carefully. Obsolescence chips were rarely installed by themselves. He'd cleaned his apartment of bugs—he did a sweep twice a tenday—but if they'd just invited themselves in… slow dread bubbled in Ratchet's tank like bad fuel. He'd have to take care of their watchers first.
Pharma rubbed his optics again, and Ratchet gently caught his hand. "They're itchy," groused Pharma, but he turned slightly and slipped his fingers between Ratchet's. "What do I do, Ratch?"
"Stop touching your eyes, for one," said Ratchet, firmly, meeting Pharma's gaze with his own. "You got the highest historical score in Orbital Anatomy, you know that causes microabrasions and filament stress." He turned Pharma's hands around and pressed glyphs into them. Two at a time, laboriously drawn out in their simplest forms—he knew only the barest dregs of chirolingual speech after so long in the Dead End, and he was sure Pharma knew even less. COUNCIL, he wrote on one. CHIP, he wrote on the other.
Pharma's winglets shivered once. He stared at Ratchet, frozen.
CONTINUE. TALK.
"I think… you should reread Vitrius Minor's study on optical filament regeneration," said Pharma, starting off slow but quickly finding his feet. His eyes were still large, though. He'd realised where the itching was from—post-operative irritation, when there'd been no aftercare or nanite injections to accelerate healing. He turned Ratchet's hands and wrote glyphs in his palms. REMOVE. IT.
Ratchet frowned at him, trying to hide his actual reaction under academic disagreement. "Vitrius Minor… you have a point. But he did say chronic physical stress resulted in the generation of brittle filaments with poor refractive properties." WILL. HURT.
Pharma gripped Ratchet's hands hard for a moment. His vents rattled, gusting air so warm it was visible in the coolness of the room. He didn't nod, but his winglets flicked in a way Ratchet had long learnt to read. "I think—I'd look great with a pair of glasses," he sniffed. "And I don't think I'm rubbing them that much."
Ratchet gently pulled away and got to his feet. "As long as you know the risks." He put a hand on Pharma's shoulder. "Look. It's been a long few days for you, and you've run yourself ragged. I'll get us something to eat? A snack, a tarp, maybe; and then we'll talk about it." He smiled, though he didn't know how convincing he was. "I'm sure I've got some gels in a cupboard somewhere."
"Mm." Pharma sounded doubtful, but he leaned into Ratchet's hand. "You don't even like sweets. Bet those were a gift from Nominus, and they've just been in there for millennia, sublimating slowly—"
"Pharma, really," said Ratchet, laughing despite himself. "It's a few tendays old at most. I tried cooking."
"I really don't know if that's better," muttered Pharma, but a tired smile was pulling up the corner of his mouth. Ratchet wanted to tweak it with a finger, get Pharma to swat at him—anything to bring his friend back to his usual self. But Ratchet had a mission right now, a grim one, and he knew he had to be careful.
He could feel Pharma's gaze on him as he stepped into the kitchenette, getting the promised gels out of his cupboard and stirring powdered pyrite into warmed energon. Did Pharma like pyrite? He… couldn't recall. The gels were still good, if far too sweet for him.
He glanced back into the living room. Pharma looked strangely small there on the couch, hunched in on himself, hands worrying at his kneespurs. For all Ratchet claimed he thought of Pharma as a friend… that wasn't quite true in practice. Hadn't been true in entirely too long. Ratchet hadn't made any effort to stay in his life, or keep up with him. If Pharma hadn't shown up at his flat, would he have noticed when the Functionists dragged him away?
Ratchet knew the answer. Shame and unease crept cold up his spine. The stirrer in his hand did not shake; it froze in place instead, a medic's reflex.
He added a bending straw to both mugs and carried them in with the gels, placing it on the low table in front of the couch. "I'll go get a tarp. Feel like watching anything? Got this fancy new viewscreen in a department raffle." He retrieved a tarp from the recharge room—warm, absorbent—and wrapped Pharma in it, fussing until it covered him without smothering his vents or pulling at his winglets. "There we go."
Pharma stared straight ahead at the viewscreen, hands curled tight around the tarp pooled in his lap. The screen was matte, offering no helpful reflection to their Council spies. Ratchet patted a shoulder vent once, both as warning and consolation. This would be quick—he'd had plenty of practice—but it would not be painless.
It took two seconds. The first to snap off the plating on the back of Pharma's head—the microwelds Ratchet had expected to find were there, and they split easily under his hands. In the next second he'd wedged a tool against the obsolescence chip squatting on Pharma's bared brain module and snapped it off, both it and its wretched little backup. The chip flew a short distance onto the floor. Ratchet held Pharma's head still so he wouldn't turn to look when the tamperproofing went off and it exploded, gouging out a burnt-edged pit in the tile. He felt tiny marble shards embed themselves in his lower legs, but he couldn't attend to them right now.
And he was only half done. He transformed another tool out of his hands and placed it against a sensory circuit cluster, sending a very precise pulse of electricity down to Pharma's optical processing node. Just enough to short it out without permanent damage. He'd have to go in through the optics to fix them, and when he did he'd remove what the Council had put there. They'd be Pharma's eyes again.
"Almost done," said Ratchet, softly. He brought his medkit out of his subspace and balanced it on the back of the couch. Pharma sat still for him, but his winglets trembled from redirected sensory feedback until Ratchet applied a pain patch. Next came temporary sealant, to fix Pharma's parietal plating in place, followed by several sprays of nanite restorative. What little energon had bled from the split had soaked neatly into the tarp, and the rest he wiped up. "I'm sorry." It was an apology for many things.
"I—" Pharma coughed static. He'd clearly muted himself—a medic's sensornet overrides would not have helped him with the pain of his eyes shorting out. "I hadn't even realised," he said. "When could they have… I should've known. I'm a medic. I should've known."
"They were very careful keeping it hidden from you," said Ratchet, gently. He took one of Pharma's hands, and wrapped it around a mug from the tray. "Drink up. We won't be coming back here. The Council will've noticed their bugs aren't responding, but it'll still take their enforcers a few minutes to get mobilised."
"Someday you're going to tell me what exactly you've been up to," said Pharma, slowly.
"I'll tell you everything," promised Ratchet. He finished off his own mug and emptied the plate of gels into his subspace. He felt a bit guilty leaving them behind; even if they hadn't been to his taste, they'd been a gift. "Once we get somewhere safe."