A Small Dose of Ratchet Fever - A Transformers Bayverse Fanfiction

Chapter 4

It was not as hard as I first imagined it would be. The work was intense, yes, but I could get through it in a very good frame of time. And if I had a question, Ratchet was right there to answer it. He didn't discourage any questions, no matter how dumb.

One question I had asked him was about different diseases and things that can happen. Because of Cybertronian anatomy and biology was so close, yet so far, from ours, many of my questions were good ones. One was if Cybertronian beings can have thrombosis. Thrombosis is a stationary blood clot in a vein or artery.

Ratchet's reply had been that yes, Cybertronian beings can in fact have thrombosis, or get thrombosis. It was just a different form, a clot of Energon in their system. It was less likely in one of them than it was in a human.

If anything, I was working more efficiently than he had expected. I swore that I saw him sometimes smile over at me out of the corner of my vision, as if he was proud. It looked like one of those proud father smiles, only without the father part. It made me feel very proud of myself.

At around five that evening, I left to give myself a break. I walked around the base a little bit, running into semi-familiar soldiers and chatted for a while. They all seemed to want me to get upset about the work, which confused me to no end.

It wasn't bad at all to work for or with Ratchet. He wasn't a bad guy, he was nice, at least sometimes. It almost made me upset that people talked down about him so much. It made me curious about the other Cybertronians on base, if they were much nicer or more hot headed.

Finally, I came back with a sandwich wrapped in saran wrap and a water bottle with a red tint to the liquid from my additives. I swallowed some pills as I walked in, trying to make sure Ratchet didn't see me.

If he thought I was sick, which I wasn't, he might make me not work. That was not what I wasn't at all.

I sat down at my desk again, opening up my sandwich to get a bite before I was right back to work, trying to make up lost time from when I was gone.

"I've never seen red tinted water before," Ratchet said in a light tone. His voice told me that he thought something was up.

I held up the bottle and shook it. The tint didn't go away. "Vitaminwater," I replied. It wasn't a total lie.

He raised up his optic ridges, I figured out what they were called, but then I just went back to my work.

A half hour later, and multiple data pad simulations later, it was about six at night.

Ratchet looked over at me. "Do you want to help me with something?"

I set the data pad down, it was a finished simulation, and looked up at him. "Sure," I shrugged. Helping him with anything was a reason that I was here, I was here to help in any way I could.

"I need to take a blood sample," he said, walking over. He had a miniscule needle in his servo.

Blood sample. Shit.

I cringed as the needle extracted a good amount of blood from my arm, then he injected the blood into a vial and ran it through a scanner.

Everything was quiet for a few minutes while I got back to work. He was still running the scan.

He was the one to break the silence. "So what stranded you here?"

In reply, I just shrugged. "Helping.. Government, I guess. Medical field."

It sounded as if he forced a small chuckle. "Most people would reject this for lack of human contact..."

"I'm the opposite..." I said softly. I chose this job to avoid human contact, at least a lot of it.

His helm tilted to the side. "And why is that? Not a very social human?"

I shrugged again.

"I understand."

I barely let out a whisper, "I doubt you do..."

It made me jump when he said, "Then how about you tell me?" I completely forgot about Cybertronian expert hearing.

"Nothing, it's nothing," I said quickly, trying to grab at a different data pad.

"It's nothing to be ashamed of," he told me softly. Was he actually being gentle? About this? Of all things.

He knew. Without a doubt, he knew.

Before I started back on my work with a data pad, to look over all of my mistakes, I gave him an odd look. I was trying to convince him nothing was 'wrong', or that I wasn't ashamed of something.

The look I saw him give me out of the corner of my eye was a look of almost respect.

Who would respect someone with cystic fibrosis?

I corrected my mistakes as quickly as I could before I left, taking my half eaten sandwich and nutrient filled water with me.