shadow_vector | Done to Me

PG 13
IDW
Arcee, Ratchet
spoilers for TOTF Arcee
Wordcount 1057
warning: this is a hc_bingo prompt for 'experiment by evil scientist'

She knew that Ratchet was disturbed by her appearance. Appearances, actually. She could feel this emotion she most desperately did not want to call ‘revulsion’ almost roiling off him. Well, to be honest, she wasn’t happy herself. Herselves. Frag. She’d somehow been able to—skill born of fear and panic and a desperate, furious desire to survive—move all three of her bodies independently, racing through the moon base, bent on escape. But now that the immediate crisis had passed, the enormity of her new situation struck her like a blunt weapon. And she had time to realize….

Flatline. He had changed her. The experiment had gone wrong, apparently. That gave her some grim satisfaction, really—that he had NOT had his way. He had not won. And she had deprived him of valuable data by escaping. Is that all she was? Data? She frowned. Ratchet paused, looking up at purple-her’s face, half-apologetic. She shook her head dismissively.

And she could sincerely hope that he had died in the base’s destruction. Which was, she realized abruptly, an un-Autobot-like thought. She should not wish malice on another Cybertronian. In combat, it was different. But this?

Well, honestly, she didn’t think there were rules or ethical guidelines for how to deal with this. How to deal with the fact that someone else has…wrought such changes on your own body, changed your future, changed your presence so thoroughly. This was worse than maiming. Limbs could be refabricated. Sparks…could not be rejoined.

Maybe she was projecting. Maybe it wasn’t that awful. She’d seen the looks on their faces when she and the other two—Skids and Mudflap—had managed to limp back to Autobot territory. She’d thought the pity was for Skids and Mudflap and the obvious damage to their processors. They were victims, not her. She was not a victim. She…refused.

They’d always presumed that her smaller frame made her unsuitable for heavy combat—no matter how many times she’d proved herself, even on the assault on the Nemesis after Megatron’s death, even after derailing Starscream’s mad plan to recreate the Allspark, they’d held her as a secondary participant. The heroes there were the others—Smokescreen, Air Raid—those who had given far more than she had. Not a victim. But not a hero either. Until she had staggered the twins’ ship into the hangar, her voice over comm confident, sure. And then they’d seen her—all three of her, and….

Something must have shown on her faces. Ratchet laid his scanner down, looking up at purple-her’s face. “It helps to talk about it,” he said. “Sometimes.”

She shrugged—her pink one, the one she thought of as her, as more her than the others, who were also her. “Maybe this isn’t one of those times.”

“Maybe it is.” He kept his face on the purple one’s.

“All right,” she said, deliberately switching to her blue frame. “I hate this. I hate everything about this. I hate how I look. I mean…look at me.” She allowed purple-her to raise her arms—uneven, asymmetric, ungainly. So unlike the beautiful sleek symmetry of her old form. Her original form. The form she had worn through so many orbital cycles.

“Different aesthetics,” Ratche said, blandly. “There’s no judgment involved.”

“Decepticon aesthetics,” she spat from her purple mouth, letting her blue optics drill into Ratchet’s.

“Yes,” he admitted. “But it allows us to study their technological refinements. Our developments have…split in the ages since the wars began.”

“Of course,” she said, bitterly, “because I love to be a scientific exhibit, and not a sentient bot.”

“That’s not what I’m saying.” He paused, realizing…it was what he was saying. Precisely. But before he could formulate an apology that was less awful, that could hope to undo the damage, she continued.

“And their developments are because they have no ethical constraints upon their experimentation, unlike us.” She glared, from all three of her faces, catching Ratchet in a crossfire of resentment.

“I didn’t say they were better.”

She said nothing, letting the discomfort swell between them. Let him feel bad. Let him realize how insulting he was, viewing her as nothing more than a display of clever engineering.

After a long moment, he said, cautiously, “We can do this another time.”

“No.” The answer from all three of her vocalizers. She wasn’t ready for this, now, but she doubted she’d be any more ready for waiting. And the idea of heading toward this, seeing it rolling toward her on her duty log, bracing herself for this examination…? She wasn’t sure she could do that. “Get it over with.”

“I need to know the engineering to be able to repair you if things go wrong,” Ratchet said, his voice lacking its usual gruff tone.

“Fine,” she snapped. “I never said otherwise.”

“I know. It’s just…it’s not idle curiosity,” he said. The closest he could come to an apology, she suspected. That was all right. She wasn’t good with them herself. “Or pity.”

Purple-her flinched. Pity. Primus no, she did not want pity.

“I don’t know how to do this,” pink-her said. “I hate this, but I don’t want…anyone else’s judgment. Like they have no right to feel…bad for me. Because they don’t know.”

“They don’t know,” blue-her echoed.

“They don’t,” Ratchet agreed. “They can’t know. No one can ever understand what you’ve been through, Arcee.” He bent to pick up his scanner again. “You can fight against this, and tear yourself apart, and let the opinions of others become a mirror in which you see yourself.”

“And what? Just…never look in the mirror again?” She threw his metaphor back at him. Double meaning and all.

He ignored it. “Or you can realize that what you are is not…this.” He thumped one of the lumpy fairings. “What you are, your essence, what kept you alive, and ruined Flatline’s experiment…is something beautiful, Arcee. Something strong. Something that I have never seen want to give up. If you give up, they win.”

“What I am IS this, though, Ratchet. We’re all formed by our frames—size, armor weight, everything. Our bodies create us. We’re not just…floating sparks.”

“No. We’re not. But you can view your body as an impediment. Or a challenge.” He turned, slowly, meeting all three of her faces.

“A challenge,” she said, softly. All three of her.