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Pharma is standing over his evening cube in the small fueling area, hands full of mineral supplements, when Ratchet slopes in, overcharged and smelling of oil and ozone.
Ratchet leans against the prep counter. He's a wreck, even at first glance, his plating gaping and a smear of blue paint on the inside of his stark white thigh. Pharma looks down at his cube and sets it aside untouched.
"That looks good," Ratchet says, smiling. His whole face is so warm and open that Pharma can't help but stare at it, even though the rest of him is delicious. "Make me one?"
Pharma can see how others could easily get the wrong impression if they ever saw Ratchet like this, but Pharma knows what it's like to feel so close to the edge he'll implode. How something like this is better than the alternatives. He suggests, instead, "Some coolant might be better."
Ratchet slumps into a chair, his heavy legs set casually wide, thumb rubbing at a loosened seam on the inside of his thigh. Pharma’s optics follow the lazy, suggestive motion. In the low light cast by the fixture over the wash basin, Ratchet's white panels have a coppery cast to them.
That much alone surfaces the memory of the other times Ratchet's come to him. His fuel pump leaps up several levels of output, his plating loosening to vent heat in anticipation. Pharma thought at some point, under the stress of profession and politics, that he might at some point grow inured to casual flings with Ratchet, but he's pleased to find the accreted grime bogging down his processor is easy to slough with sufficient motivation.
"Is that your professional opinion?" Ratchet asks, chuffing laughter out his vents. He looks up at Pharma and smirks. A tingle of anticipation darts up Pharma's spinal strut.
A knot of sensation blooms in Pharma's array, his valve clenching around nothing and his spike nudging at the interior of the housing. The endless cycle of hospital-research-conference means it's been too long since he made an attempt at soliciting any sort of romantic engagement, so Pharma feels only a little foolish and reckless when he asks, "Are you certain that's what you need? My professional opinion?
"Mmh," Ratchet begins and scrubs a hand casually over his closed array panel. "Maybe you could give me a consult?"
They’ve done this before. Dozens of times. Maybe a hundred, spread out over the years, in berths, the occasional medical storage room, and once, memorably, with celebratory elation in Pharma’s office after his very first promotion. He wonders if Ratchet was planning this the entire night — coming home and wrangling Pharma into a berth — or if inspiration struck when he arrived.
Pharma closes the distance faster than he'd like to admit, planting a knee on Ratchet's thigh. Ratchet's panel opens with a hiss and Pharma reaches for him, already eager, his fingers touching wet heat as Ratchet's hands land on Pharma's waist, pulling him closer. There's lubrication everywhere and Pharma catches the potent smell of a stranger's transfluid.
Ratchet’s been busy; his valve is puffy and slick, the red and white mesh engorged, nodes glowing with charge. The outer rim has been stretched open by something large, beading with lubricant and transfluid, and Pharma sinks two fingers effortlessly into the gape.
"How many spikes did you have in here tonight?" Pharma asks, bending to lick Ratchet's throat for the pleasure of feeling it flex beneath his mouth.
"Three," Ratchet groans, rocking against Pharma’s fingers without being told. It never takes much to set him off and he's already been thoroughly warmed up. "They took turns one after another while I sucked them off."
"And you’re still hungry for more, aren’t you?" Pharma could eat him alive. He wants to push Ratchet onto the nearest flat surface and bury his face between those powerful thighs, but he has to pace himself or he'll blow something.
"It's been a long time since we've messed around," Ratchet says, pushing his hands up beneath the rim of Pharma's canopy and feeling for the cabling there. "Did you miss me?"
"Of course I did," Pharma says, his fuel pump already beginning to labor and his frame shifting in anticipation. He remembers the taste, feel, and smell of Ratchet so intimately, recognition abutted by greedy pleasure.
Pharma doesn't ask if Ratchet missed him. This is evidence enough, like a gift wrapped specially for Pharma. Ratchet pulls Pharma's head down and kisses him, mouth open. Pharma groans into it, vocal synthesizer already emitting mostly reverb. His turbine clicks a few times, trying to engage, and his wings tilt up to vent heat from his chassis beneath them.
"My berth is closer than yours," Pharma says against Ratchet's panting mouth, twisting his hand so his fingertip sensors make contact with a ring of internal nodes. Ratchet makes an airy sound like steam escaping a pipe.
"Too far away. On the couch." Ratchet pushes Pharma away, who backs across the small space and sits obediently. Ratchet rises from his chair and then descends on Pharma; he's always been faster than he looks. Pharma finds his arms full of Ratchet moments later, the smell of him everywhere, the churning heat. He can't think of anything else he could wish for right this second except more of this, his processor grinding through every picosecond of Ratchet rubbing almost frantically against him, like he can't get enough of touching Pharma.
Pharma tips his head back and pulls at Ratchet's waist, stroking over the heavy plates, a wide stretch of metal perfect for clutching. A few clumsy thrusts and his spike slips inside, no resistance, just a smooth glide. He shudders all over, his frame readjusting in dozens of microtransformations, and grips Ratchet even harder. "Who are you thinking about?"
"Just you," Ratchet says, grinding down onto Pharma’s spike. "Frag me harder."
"You’re still that needy for it?" Pharma asks and pushes a finger in alongside his spike. "I bet I could get my whole hand in this fragged-out hole of yours. Maybe I should try your aft instead."
"Please," Ratchet mumbles and it isn't clear if he's begging for more or for mercy. Pharma is going to frag him either way.
Pharma hooks two fingers into Ratchet's aft as advertised, plumbing the tight opening. He can feel his own spike through the thin mesh wall separating the two channels, Ratchet's valve stuffed full, his aft straining around the intrusion. "You're such a slut for it when you're like this."
Ratchet laughs and grinds harder, digging his fingers into Pharma's shoulders. "I love it when you're nasty. Do you talk like that with all the mechs you frag, or am I special?"
"Only with you," Pharma says, scraping his teeth on Ratchet's collar. He works his fingers deeper and flexes his hips upwards, rubbing the tip of his spike on Ratchet's ceiling node. "Next time you go out, you should have one of them stretch out your aft for me so I can spike that, too."
Ratchet moans. "Would've been impossible. You should've seen the size of them." Then, almost too hazy with static to understand, he asks, "Want the recording?"
Pharma goes rigid beneath him, withdrawing his fingers from Ratchet's aft, and fumbles almost desperately for a cable as Ratchet exposes a port. They connect with a click, almost inaudible over Pharma's ventilations. Ratchet skips recklessly past all the security protocols and offers Pharma a raw, unsecured data connection.
He leaps on it, wrapping himself greedily in the sensation of Ratchet's frame doubled with his own. Ratchet groans, curling his fingers over Pharma's shoulders, then rubs his hands down Pharma's chest. "Frag, you feel good."
If Pharma feels good, Ratchet feels even better. He's less overcharged than Pharma expects, but Pharma still has no idea how he's even upright, much less so clear, a blaze of charge swelling his lines until they ache, a strut-deep burning need. It's intense enough that Pharma gets the blowback from it, his own sensory suite crackling with feedback. "They didn't make you overload?"
"See for yourself," Ratchet says.
Ratchet turns over the memory file and Pharma opens it without hesitating. He stumbles headlong into a buffet of secondhand sensation so intense his own frame comes to a complete standstill while he processes it. The ghost of hands all over Ratchet is disorienting, heavy, thick fingers under parts of Pharma's frame that don't exist.
One of them had a swelling flange that locked in place. Pharma groans when he accesses the sensory data from Ratchet's valve, the way the bulge of it distended the mesh and forced Ratchet's calipers wide.
"Good one, huh?" Ratchet asks, picking up the pace where Pharma left off. The sensation of being ridden by Ratchet superimposed by having his — no, Ratchet's — valve stuffed by a colossal spike is almost enough to make him blow right there.
If he closes his optics, he can feel a spike nudging at the back of Ratchet's throat. Ratchet didn't overload at all. He saved that part for Pharma, the urgent ache, the almost itchy swell of charge crawling through his lines. Pharma swallows against the feeling and says, hoarsely, "You had fun."
"I'm having fun right now," Ratchet says and Pharma can feel how true that is, too. Ratchet's undivided attention is as intoxicating as it is rare. He puts a hand in the center of Pharma's chest and pushes him against the back of the couch, pinning him there so he can mouth the mechanics beneath Pharma's chin. "You smell good."
"I smell like the hospital," Pharma murmurs, slinging his arm around Ratchet. The pace of Ratchet's hips slows to a crawl, sending shivers through Pharma. His mouth falls open and Ratchet kisses him like that, slow and sweet.
Sometimes Ratchet makes it easy to forget that Pharma isn't the only one he's fragging. Sometimes it's never more apparent.
Pharma doesn't mind either way.
"I said what I said," Ratchet says, optics glittering with mischief. He pushes his face into the slope of Pharma's neck, pausing to bite at the cabling before working his way down Pharma's shoulder.
Pharma tips his head back, letting Ratchet have his way. Ratchet's got incredible skill with more than his hands — and an incredible frame, wide and squarish, plenty for Pharma to hold on to. He rubs his hands up and down Ratchet's back, basking in the lazy roll of Ratchet's hips which seem specifically engineered to drive him mad at a glacial pace.
"You like that," Ratchet says. They're still connected. Pharma couldn't lie even if he wanted to.
Pharma does like it. Ratchet's tantalizingly loose, his valve soft and giving. It's like nothing else; Cybertronian construction is always so unyielding, except for the lush grip of a valve or aft port.
"Let's go somewhere more comfortable," Pharma murmurs against his audial. He palms the cable connection closed, a little too tender to keep a grip on the unfiltered connection. He coaxes Ratchet off his spike and out of his lap, loath to remove himself from the confines of Ratchet's valve — in the end, despite Ratchet's faint protests, the desire to see Ratchet spread out below him is more powerful.
Ratchet allows Pharma to hoist him, unresisting, and carry him to the edge of Pharma's berth. He's heavy, a solid, sturdy weight, and Pharma loves every centimeter of his dense frame. Pharma lowers him with care, stealing a brief kiss, and then releases him.
Ratchet sprawls out on the padding beneath him, legs spread in invitation.
Pharma starts on the floor at Ratchet's knees, kissing his way up one thigh and then the other, stroking plating. He bends and licks Ratchet's valve, sucking his way around the ring of glossy biolights studding the soft mesh. He can taste the electric-metal flavor of transfluid when he dips his tongue past the rim of Ratchet's valve. If Ratchet wasn't already so charged up, Pharma might be tempted to see exactly how long he could spend bent in such delectable service before Ratchet begged for overload.
Pharma gives Ratchet's anterior node a single teasing flick to see him jerk and groan in protest, then skips past his closed spike housing to mouth up the flat, armored expanse of Ratchet's abdominal plating.
He straightens and looks down at Ratchet. He's gorgeous. Ratchet says, "Come up here and frag me," and coaxes Pharma on top of him with outstretched hands.
Pharma pushes his spike back into Ratchet's valve. It goes in like a dream, slick, smooth, soft and twitching around him. He can't think of anything else except Ratchet's frame, the way it fits him so easily after he's been fragged, the way Pharma is the last one here, the one leaving his mark alone, sweet and deep, in the dim glow of Pharma's berthroom.
Rachet's body beneath him is always like something from his hottest fluxes come true, like Pharma could happily crawl inside him and inhabit the same space, cycle the same air, feel the same things. There's no denying their suitability in the berth. This part was never the problem.
"Pharma," Ratchet moans, his arm slung over his face. His optics are bright, unfocused, his mouth opening and closing helplessly. "Oh, frag. Harder."
"Like this?" Pharma asks, pushing deeper, bottoming out until Ratchet buzzes a single glyph of affirmation. He pins Ratchet to the berth with a hand at the base of his throat, thumbing a taut cable. His dark fingers fit well there, fingers splayed on Ratchet's wide collar. "Look at me."
Ratchet looks, his expression open and vulnerable. Pharma shoves Ratchet's leg up as far as it'll bend, spreading him wide, and thrusts down into his valve. The sound it makes is obscene, a wet sucking noise.
Pharma pushes his fingers into Ratchet's mouth. Ratchet takes them deep, all the way down to the palm, and sucks greedily. Static arcs between his fingertips, a buzzing that races through him. That's how Pharma overloads, spilling transfluid into Ratchet's valve, hunched and hot, a melting feeling in his lines. Ratchet shoves a hand between them and furiously rubs his anterior node. He follows only a moment later, the kick from his overload triggering half a dozen resonant aftershocks in Pharma's frame.
Ratchet rocks onto Pharma's spike until the sensation dissipates into a warm, silken slide of mesh on metal. Pharma squeezes Ratchet's hips, cycling atmosphere out of his side vents, and keeps him in place with his softening spike buried in the comforting heat. In a haze, Pharma thinks he could live like this, the most vulnerable part of his body in the most vulnerable part of the body of another mech.
They relax almost simultaneously, sighing in sync, and Pharma settles back onto his knees. Ratchet extracts himself and stretches his legs out over the edge of the berth, rubbing contentedly at his chest plating. He'll go wash, his preference. It's a familiar, medical fastidiousness; Pharma normally joins him, but the aftershocks of the overload and the decadence of the shared memory file make him uncommonly tolerant of being messy.
Pharma flattens out onto his belly in the warm spot Ratchet leaves behind, spreading out on the berth and untucking his wings. He stretches out, flexing his joints until his seams loosen and his actuators release the tension he's been holding for who knows how long.
If he closes his optics, the stress of the hospital feels like a distant memory. Idly, he thinks that maybe there's something to Ratchet's approach. Maybe he should frag more often.
A weight settles over Pharma's legs, Ratchet stroking his palms up Pharma's spinal strut. His panel grazes Pharma's aft and he thinks about the slag he was talking earlier, and maybe how it'd be nice to have Ratchet frag his aft instead. Ratchet's got a fantastic spike, nice and thick and firm, and the head of it always catches deliciously on a sweet spot deep in Pharma's sensor clusters, no matter which hole he's fragging.
Ratchet asks, "Feeling good?" interrupting Pharma's reverie.
Pharma hums as Ratchet's hands rub a stretch of hard-to-reach plating below his wings. "You don't have to do that."
"I like it," Ratchet says, pressing a kiss to the edge of an aileron. "It's good for you."
Pharma turns his face to the side and huffs softly. "Well, if it's good for me."
"You work too hard," Ratchet says, pressing against Pharma's shoulder plating. When the pressure disappears, Pharma's entire frame loosens fractionally. Even a good frag hasn't shaken out all the little misalignments from standing long hours hunched over patients.
"You work too hard," Pharma grumbles. "A twenty nine hour surgery with no breaks? And then a night out before you recharged?"
"Going out was taking a break. And I'm taking a break right now," Ratchet says. His fingers pry up a maintenance access seam and he folds open a plate that exposes the intricate mechanics that allow Pharma's components to slot into place in his alt mode. "I like to get a little fendered and fondle gorgeous internals. It's one of my favorite hobbies."
"And the extracurricular fragging?" Pharma asks, creeping towards something they've never really spoken about. Pharma might not have grounds to be jealous of Ratchet's attention, but he's certainly envious of Ratchet's lack of self-consciousness. "Aren't you ever afraid someone will recognize you? A patient?"
"Kinda mechs I go see," Ratchet says, tone easygoing, unworried, "won't ever make it out this way to see me. I bet you'd love them. You like the big ones, don't you? They don't get a lot of flight frames out where I go. You'd have a dozen mechs worshipping your spike if you'd like."
"You're overcharged," Pharma says, but a fizzle of static pops along his lines. Ratchet's right — Pharma loves big hands and big spikes, the smell of machinery that's been hard at work. "I'd settle for just one." With a sigh, as Ratchet caresses a stretch of cabling, he says, "That's pleasant."
Pharma shudders as Ratchet's talented fingers glide directly over his exposed spinal strut. There's something terribly intimate about it, a deep foundation of trust required to let someone so deeply into your frame. Ratchet only makes one pass, an expert inspection, and then closes Pharma's paneling again, evidently satisfied with Pharma's general state of repair.
"Ratchet," he murmurs.
"Pharma," Ratchet teases. His fingers dip into rarely touched flight components. His mechanics aren't sensitive, but the experience is novel enough it makes his plating contract.
Pharma doesn't prefer a detailer touching these parts of his frame. It's too intimate. He doesn't have anyone to take care of him like this, to help him reach all the delicate and vulnerable components in his frame.
"Do you have time?" he asks, hating how hesitant he sounds. Ratchet's done this for him before, but it's somehow more emotionally fraught than the fragging.
Ratchet doesn't answer, but his weight lifts off Pharma's frame and then the berth. The light in the hall goes on then off again. Ratchet hums to himself the whole while, collecting the cleaning kit. Pharma squeezes his optics closed.
It's a shame there's the last half step between them. Pharma feels it keenly now. It's a gap he can't manage to bridge in himself, a flinch at the moment of landing.
Ratchet returns and begins rubbing soft wax into Pharma's plating with a cleaning sham, thorough in his attention. Pharma's haptics tingle in the wake, a pleasant buzz of charge rising in his frame even in the wake of his spectacular overload.
Pharma's thoughts slowly quiet, everything else falling into an inoffensive background hum. Ratchet has such wonderful hands. Eventually Ratchet's methodical touch turns into a lazy, soothing caress. Pharma feels like a new mech, all the tension and strain in his frame gone out.
"Have you ever seriously considered it?" Pharma asks, rousing from his doze. "Us?"
"Mm?" Ratchet asks, almost absently, then his hand stills as he seems to divine the topic from Pharma's tone. "Of course. All the time. I know you wouldn't be happy."
"No," Pharma agrees, a deeper tension around his spark dissipating. "You're right. But it'd be terribly convenient."
Perhaps something might have once solidified between them, but Pharma is reaching for something just out of his grasp, and his professional envy feels impossible to root out under the yoke of his alt mode exemption. They want different things for different reasons, and that missed beat might as well put them a universe apart from one another. The low grade discordance and resentment would eventually tear them in two, ruin this thing they have now.
"You'll find someone. Our line of work and romance rarely mix well, but they can," Ratchet says, then continues with a surprising frankness, "I do love you."
That is, also surprisingly, satisfying to Pharma.
Pharma reaches back and touches Ratchet's thigh. "I love you too. Come frag me this time? Primus knows when we'll get another chance."
"I'll mess up all my hard work," Ratchet says, laughter gentle, low, comforting, but Pharma twists to meet him because he's already descending.