“So,” Rodimus starts. “You and the Hatchet, huh?”
Drift smiles. It’s easy to smile these days, easy to feel good. Especially now, walking through Old Nyon’s party district with Rodimus, taking in the sights and sounds and smells, the flickering neon and the hot pavement. When he pictures Roddy’s personality, he sees this, sees dark skies and stars and brightly lit club entrances. He hears laughter. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says, laughing.
Rodimus pumps his fist, taking a skipping hop-step ahead of Drift before turning around to face him, walking backwards. “Yes! I knew it!”
“I think the whole ship knows by now, Roddy,” Drift laughs, tugging him out of the way before he can careen into an unsuspecting pedestrian. “We’re not exactly being subtle.”
Rodimus falls back into step with Drift, elbowing him before hooking their arms together. He’s over a head shorter than Drift and it’s a little awkward, but Drift wouldn’t change it for the world. “Seriously, though. I’m happy for you guys.”
Drift smiles, sending Rodimus a soft look. “Thanks. We’re… Things are really good right now.”
“Yeah, they are.”
They walk on in companionable silence for half a block, record time for Rodimus, before they run into a fuel truck selling gelled energon bites.
“Drift, look,” Rodimus cries.
“I see it.”
“I’m going for it.”
Rather than being tugged along into the throng of mechs around the truck, Drift hangs back. He finds an empty, relatively clean section of wall just beside an alley and settles in to watch and wait. He’s more overcharged than he thought, he realizes, and his head spins a little in time with the flashing lights of the club across the street. It’s beautiful, the way the lights smudge across the shadows. The street is narrow, surrounded by towering buildings, most of which have seen better days, and heavily trafficked stairs to the lower levels of the city sit at every street corner. Nyon isn’t his favorite city, but Drift has always been a city mech. Any city is a good city in his opinion.
He glances back to Roddy, who’s almost reached the front of the line, then up to the star-speckled sky. Cycling air slowly through his vents, he lets his optics drift offline for just a moment before something pricks the edge of his awareness. Something that makes his plating clamp down tight. A familiar EM field or an odd sound, he can’t be sure. He onlines his optics, but then there’s a pinch in his shoulder joint, a rush of cold, and then—
Nothing.
Drift wakes up cold, alone, weak. He manages to online his optics, but the rest of his frame is frighteningly unresponsive.
Come on, Drift. Get your bearings. Get yourself together.
Dark room, midsized. Clean, filled with medical equipment. Not good. There are only so many reasons one gets grabbed off the street in a city like Nyon, and none of them are great. There’s something more, though. Something tugging at the periphery of his hazy mind. Something…
The door hisses open. “Deadlock.”
There it is. There he is. “Tarn,” Drift tries to say, but his intake isn’t working properly and what comes out is a gurgling mess of syllables.
“Don’t strain yourself,” Tarn drawls. “There will be plenty of that coming.”
By the time Ratchet and Roddy reach Drift, he’s in such a horrible state that it’s only Ratchet’s medical experience and sparkbond with Drift that reassure Ratchet Drift’s still alive. He’s been opened up from intake to interface cover, plating peeled back like some sort of skinned mechanimal. He’s strapped to some sort of perverted medical table, and energon congeals on his plating, the table around him, the floor.
::Drift!:: Ratchet pings him, at the same time as he calls, “Drift,” as loud as he dares. No response.
“Is he…” Rodimus starts.
“No.” No, he’s not, and he won’t be any time soon if Ratchet has anything to say about it. Time to get to work.
The second he touches Drift’s finial, he startles online, optics blinking on and frame locking up to the best of its mangled ability. “Deadlock,” he rasps, voice clear despite the state of his face. Classic nerve damage or paralytic drug; Ratchet’s hoping it’s the latter. “Production number 1-6-0—”
“Drift,” Ratchet calls again. “Drift, kid, it’s me. It’s Ratchet.”
Drift’s optics snap to him, dilating and refocusing a few times before comprehension sparks. Then, because Drift will never stop surprising Ratchet, he starts to purr. It’s a broken, hitching sound, but it’s there, and when Ratchet tightens his grip on Drift’s finial it gets louder. “Ratch,” Drift chokes out, mechanical eloquence gone with whatever torture resistance training had brought it. “Knew y’would come.”