Okay okay I’m currently rereading fortuna primaginia for like the seventh or eighth time rn and I am genuinely very curious (and you by no means have to answer this if you don’t want to) but how would the story have differed if Ratchet had shot his shot first and reader had ended up with him before Optimus? My mind is just rolling at the parallels of what could be similar but what would be so very different. Would Optimus have even attempted engaging the reader after that? I love them so much!!!
(Anon sorry I'm sure you just wanted a simple little aside but you're getting a full blown greentext headcanon sloppy style fanfic)
Slaps ask This bad boy can fit SO MUCH angst in it good fucking god. This has been literally eating at my brain every waking second since I received it. There’s just so, so many ways this could go down. And since there IS so many ways this could go down, please by no means treat this shit my brain coughed out as the only way. It’s just a way. But it got my in a vice grip and won’t let go.
Also if anyone’s got their own ideas about how this could’ve gone down please, please share
-Around the time you guys had your first little late night/early movie pow wow, Ratchet, in a wired/half asleep delirium, makes a pass. -It’s a throwaway pass, probably relevant to something in the movie. He doesn’t expect you to even respond. -He definitely doesn’t expect you to reciprocate. -He knows he should stop right exactly here and never bring it up again
-But he doesn’t. -He’s old. He’s tired. He’s (at least a little) drunk. He’s been fighting for so long and passed up so many chances at happiness. Fuck it. He’s gonna see where this goes. -He starts making excuses to see you more often, and you do the same with him.
-OP notices this and immediately backs off, full stop. -You figure he wasn’t actually that into you to begin with, and (albeit reluctantly) shrug it off, and are thus freed to peruse Ratchet with no remorse. -In reality, it’s a knee-jerk reaction out of respect to Ratchet, since he’d done the same for him when they were dating, and he’d first started talking to Elita. Ratchet already sacrificed his happiness for him once before. he’s not going to let him do it again. -But that doesn’t stop his feelings from doing…whatever it is they’re doing. -You still saved Bumblebee. You still adopted Bumblebee, so this mech can’t not see you. -Every time he takes you to the park, or the movies, or on a nature walk somewhere, and sees you playing with his sparkling he wants to shove his head into an industrial trash compressor -He’s happy for you. He’s happy for Ratchet. He’s forever indebted to you for saving Bumblebee and Primus-fragging-blessed why isn’t that enough? -That and he’s still actively mourning the loss of Elita, whom you share an almost identical EM signature with, so every time he’s within sensing range of you he’s blasted with grief and guilt. -But he still spends time with you. It hurts just to look at you, but if the alternative is not seeing you at all then he’ll gladly endure the pain.
-When the heat cycle hits, you’re actually with Optimus. He, you and Bumblebee were in one of the training rooms getting some (gentle, for Bee’s sake) exercise. -When that electrical, wet, cracked egg sensation first drips down your spine, Optimus stops what he’s doing, stares at you, and starts trembling. -You’re understandably worried and ask him what’s wrong. -He manages to articulate something about you emitting an abnormal EM frequency, and to please to go see Ratchet about it immediately. -You have more questions, but he excuses himself from the conversation to walk a safe distance away from you Bee, and proceeds to tear a fucking wall out -You go to the infirmary to see Ratchet, who explains heat cycles and why he thinks your mutant little human body is mimicking one while crushing the edge of a medical berth with his servos. -You, already pretty riled up from watching two (2) of your handsome robot buddies crush and smash things on your behalf, tell him to go ahead and break the Hynek’s scale with you -Ratchet,having zero reason to restrain himself otherwise, mass converts, bends you over a human-sized medical gurney, and fucks you until you black out.
-You don’t go into a coma. Ratchet’s exceptionally skilled in maneuvering his field, so freeing it from your grabby, inexperienced one isn’t a problem for him. -Nor do you wind up with a busted pelvis, bruises or bleeding after sex(at least, not by much. His dick’s still the size of two tallboy monster cans duct-taped together.) -But after the third or so time you guys bone, you do start coughing a lot. And passing out a lot. And puking a lot. -Ratchet’s starting to worry he missed something in his evaluation of your body’s adaption to energeon and cybertronian bio fluids. So he runs some scans. -Lolnope. Turns out you adapted too well. You’re fucking pregnant. -He stares at the results for a whole-ass hour before he can even summon the courage to explain this to you. -By “explain” he means “I had no idea this was possible and I still don’t know how it’s possible or what the fuck it’s going to do to your tiny little squishy body if you decide to keep it.” -You, knowing full well how devastatingly close their whole species is to extinction, thinking about Bumblebee growing up without ever seeing another sparkling, decide “fuck it. We doing spacemom 2 : electric boogaloo”
-Ratchet’s whole ass world changes right exactly then. -In a bad way. -He’s going to be supportive. He’s going to take care of you. He’s going to monitor you night and day and give you everything you could possibly ever need, because not only is this entirely his fault and he cares about you, but- -He doesn’t want to be around sparklings. -Bumblebee is different. Bumblebee doesn’t exist because of him -But because of what happened with Soundwave, and the cassettes, he does not want to have a sparkling. He’s not allowed to. Not after what he did. -He starts drinking more. And loosing himself in his work. And finding reasons to not be around you. -Or anyone. -He’s in his lab constantly. He says it’s because he’s learning as much as he possibly can about human bodies and human reproduction and running what tests he can to find out how to give you the nutrients the sparkling needs without poisoning you, how to compensate for the effects of your weaker field on it’s organ and internal systems development. -He’s not lying. But he’s also using it as an excuse to stay the hell away from you. -Your relationship starts deteriorating, along with your health. -Seeing you getting sicker and weaker because of something he did to you is dredging all his baggage with the Iaconian hospital experiments up from the dark corners of his mind and you are in no condition for him to confess about that now. -So he hides. You’re left out in the cold.
-Optimus see’s you emotionally freezing to death, and offers warmth. -The time you’d normally reserved for spending with Ratchet is now spent with him. -You don’t want to dump your problems on him. You don’t. -But Optimus feels the sting of Ratchet’s cold shoulder just as badly as you do. So he winds up being less an emotional dumping ground and more of a commiserating partner. -You’re both so worried about him. -Op’s so worried about you, being balls deep in your carrying cycle, puking blood almost daily and in a terrible place with your baby daddy. -He tells himself it doesn’t go deeper than that. And it never will -He knows it’s bullshit. -He knows his spark screaming out for him to comfort you and screaming out for him to take you are two vines in the same jungle, hopelessly braided together and impossible to separate fully. -He knows this and he still invites you out to stargaze after Bee’s been put to sleep, wrapping you up in so many sweaters and blankets and bringing you to the top of the base for the clearest view of the desert sky. -He’ll lie down on his back and you’ll sit next to his helm and nerd out until you inevitably fall asleep mid-sentence somewhere. -He’s heard you name every single star in every single visible constellation a hundred times, and he’ll gladly hear it a hundred more. -He offhandedly compares you to Ursa while you’re pointing it out, and you break down in tears. -You’re not a bear. You’ve never been a bear. Bears are strong enough to keep their shit together. You’re not keeping your shit together. At all. -He tells you that’s bullshit. He tells you anyone in your position would be breaking down, yes including a bear. -He tells you you’re the strongest person he’s ever met and whatever’s going on with Ratchet’s not your fault. It’s not. -He has a point, but you still feel so weak, and tell him you can see why Ratchet wouldn’t want to be with someone as fragile as you. -Seeing you like this breaks something in him. There’s protocols blowing up left and right in his processor and spark telling him to stop the tiny human from crying. Stop the adoptive mother of his sparkling from crying. Stop you from crying. -So he rolls over, he cradles you against his cheek while you sob. You lean into him, throw your tiny arms around him and - -He kisses you -He realizes it’s a mistake the second he does it. He breaks the kiss, wracked with guilt, apologies immediately, tires to pull away- -You don’t let him. You kiss him back. -His field rolls over you out of nowhere like a tsunami, knocking you on your ass. -He can feel your field already sinking it’s inexperienced kitten claws into his, and he yanks it away before they can entwine further. -You two stare at each other in silence for a few moments after that, before wordlessly heading back inside. -You go straight to bed, too tired to analyze exactly what the fuck that was, or wonder if you were wrong about him not liking you. -He goes back to his room and stares at the wall. He has no excuse for what the fuck he just did. He doesn’t even drink. He made that mistake stone cold sober. -Both you and Ratchet need his support right now, not whatever shit he just pulled. -He’s a leader and a father. He can’t ever afford to make a mistake like that again. -But he can’t leave you alone, because he knows Ratchet won’t be here for you. -And he can’t leave Ratchet alone, because he won’t let anyone else near him. -He stares at the wall for the rest of the night.
-The next day, the sparkling sends out it’s first ping, seeking to start it’s nonverbal, psychic bond with it’s sire -Except, it doesn’t send it to it’s sire. -Ratchet’s field had been clamped so tightly around his frame ever since this started you haven’t been able to feel it at all. Naturally, the sparkling had nothing to cling to either. -Instead, it forms a bond with the mech who’s field dragged you in like a riptide -It forms one with Optimus -Neither of you bring this up to Ratchet. You can’t. You both already feel guilty as hell for whatever the fuck that was. -But neither of you can deny the gravitational pull you feel towards each other anymore. -The sparkling starts sending him clips of your voice. Of His voice. -Optimus feels his spark splitting in two both because this tiny little ethereal voice is calling out to him, not Ratchet, and because he can’t answer that tiny voice. -You make tentative plans to put your head through a fucking cheese grater the second this metal baby is out of you.
-Fortunately, that comes sooner than later. -Unfortunately, much like with Bee, the sparkling’s field gets lodged in your brainwaves during emergence, and can’t fully separate -They do finally become untangled once she’s born -But that’s only after your neural activity slows to a crawl when you blackout -NOW it’s coma time, baby.
-Seeing you comotose after giving birth to his sparkling is the last straw for Ratchet -He snaps -Hands the sparkling to Optimus, apologizes, and just leaves. -Optimus is left largely alone and flailing with this sparkling, who is basically recognizing him as her dad. -She repeatedly sends him clips of your voice, her way of asking “Where’s mom? I want mom? I waited so long to see them where’s mom?” -The first thing she blurts out with her primitive vox are the beginning notes to David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs. -Echo seems like a fitting name. He relays this experience and the suggestion to Ratchet. -Ratchet’s optics glaze over. His lip trembles. He unintentionally crushes the cube of hi-grade he’s holding, but agrees. -But beyond that, Ratchet is gone. -Wakes up, attends to any medical issues for the team, then drinks himself to unconsciousness, rinse and repeat. -He is a miserable, drunk old bastard barely fit for duty let alone to be a father -Thank god for Fowler, who’s kept people like Astoria, Carly and Raoul on call for exactly this outcome(He predicted robot fucking would have repercussions, and he was RIGHT) -Astoria takes one look at your comatose body and gets her tubes tied immediately. -They wind up having to take babysitting off base most of the time, though, because Ratchet refuses to be around any humans -Which is why when Jack, Miko and Raf wind up there eventually, he’s less than enthused. -They should leave. They NEED to leave, because he’s only ever hurt things smaller than himself. -Despite this, Raf and Bumblebee manage to still get through to him somehow. -His relationship with Echo, though. -It’s bad. -He can’t even look at her without seeing your face. And Soundwave’s face. And every single cassette he forced into existence.
-Optimus visits you while you slumber. -It’s not often that he can do this, pressure of being a leader. And a father. And now the lone diplomatic relation between cybertronians and humanity, after you decided to take a preemptive dirt nap. -Sometimes he tells you mundane things, like how his day went, how everyone’s doing -He likes to tell you how Bee and Echo are doing. That they’ve gotten along exceedingly well. Their so close in age, that’s to be expected. -But Bee adores her, and she’s aggressively possessive of him -And, when he’s run out of things to say, he’ll thank you. He’ll thank you for saving Bumblebee. For fighting so hard to establish refuge for his people here. For keeping him company. For being his friend. -For letting him love you. -He always chokes up on the last one, and leaves before he can finish, excusing himself from a quiet room and leaving as silently as he came.
-Ratchet visits you too. -A lot -In fact, when he’s not in the infirmary, or his quarters, or drinking in either of those places, he’s here. -But unlike Optimus, he comes up empty for words. -He just watches your unmoving body, and the gentle oscillations of the various monitors hooked up to you -He will say one thing, though, every time. Right before he leaves -It’s always the same thing. -”I’m sorry.”
-While this is going on, you’re busy cavorting around with Elita in the realm of the primes with Rumble and Frenzy -She (lovingly) berates you for not sleeping with her husband, which is a trip in of itself. -In between trials she teaches you how to hop in and out of dreams -Even the nightmarish, extremely unstable ones -So naturally, you dive right into one of Ratchet’s dreams -You’re flooded with every single last thing haunting his mind. -All of it. His history with the medical research. Everything he’s done. -It’s so horrific you can hardly stay for longer than a heartbeat, but- -You fight through the darkness to get to him, unrelenting until you grab his servo -And when you do so, you get to see him. Actual him. The him buried beneath the toxic walls he’s built up. -And that him bleeds nothing but the purest, unconditional love for you. For your sparkling. For Optimus and Bee. -He’s still there. The mech you fell in love with is still there. -He’s just drowning in his own regret and misery with no way out -His anguish is an uncharted mountain and he needs a guide -You’re going to have to be that guide -So with some intense astral fuckery, you drag him him out of his own dream, and Elita drags the both of you into Optimus’s dream.
-Optimus’s dream is more stable. -Thank god it can withstand the emotional shitshow that is the four of you being in the same place -There’s enough angst and self-blame to flood god’s basement -Elita, being dead and all, has even less tolerance for this bullshit then the three living of you combined -She grabs you with one arm and kisses you, and uses the other arm to push Ratchet into Optimus’s lap. -It devolves into a fourway pretty fast -You’re the luckiest human in the fucking universe -Afterwards, Optimus laments how guilty he feels for wanting this. For enjoying this. How bad he feels about wanting you. How much he still wants Ratchet. -He feels like a selfish asshole for pining after you both. You two should be happy together. Why can’t he just be happy for you two while silently drowning in his grief for Elita -Both you, Ratchet and Elita tell him that’s bullshit. -Both you, Ratchet and Elita tell him all of them deserve to be happy. -Elita tells all of you in no uncertain terms if you three don’t find a way to be a thruple IRL she’ll put each and every one of you in a sex coma IRL so help her Primus.
-You wake up. -It’s been 30. Fucking. years. -The first thing you see upon waking up is the last thing you saw before blacking out -Your little girl -She’s taller than a two story townhouse and her optics are the same color as your eyes. -”Welcome back, Mom.” -You can’t even begin to comprehend what you’re seeing -You don’t have time. The next person in the room is Bee, who’s even taller. -He knees down, trembling, warbling, tears in his optics. -”Did you have a nice nap?” -Reader.exe has stopped working -The next person in -Oh -Oh. -It’s Ratchet -Bee and Echo clear out before you can scream at them not to leave, leaving you alone with your estranged boyfriend
-He walks over to you slowly, mouth set in a firm, flat line. -He kneels down beside you, places his hand on the side of the berth -And starts openly weeping. -He’s sorry. He’s sorry for putting you in danger. He’s sorry for knocking you up. he’s sorry for icing you out. He’s sorry for fucking everything and tells you if you had even a shred of self-preservation instinct left in you you’d leave him and never look back and he’d never blame you and- -And you tell him to shut the fuck up. -You kiss him. He smells like highgrade and millennia of repressed guilt and you can’t get enough of it because it’s fucking Ratchet.
-You tell him about the coma. You tell him about all the dreams. You prove it to him by relaying everything about the cassettes. -His face pales further. You decide to (temporarily) withhold information about the dream orgy -You reassure him that where you were and how you got there, you could see shit. You could see the driving force and divine interplay of how bad decisions and poor judgment come to tangle hopelessly together and prompt action like puppeteers through the strings of the livings and you’re absolutely not done which this, but -You still love him. Nothing is ever going to change that. -Dude looks like he was fucking reborn. There’s something so young in those teal searchlights that make you feel like a child again. -For a moment, everything is okay. -He spends the rest of the night with you, never once leaving your side.
-You don’t get a happily ever after yet, though. -You still have two grown-ass children you need to catch up with -One of which doesn’t know you at all. -She’s extremely eager to start a relationship with you though because she’s been looking forward to this her entire life -She might be an adult, but the way she turns her optics on you and listens with rapt attention when literally anything comes out of your mouth makes you feel like you actually got your baby back -She’s utterly fascinated by you and worships the ground you walk on, treating you like some sort of beloved idol or storybook character come to life -It’s cute for now and probably not the healthiest reaction but that is by no means your biggest concern, because -Echo and Ratchet’s relationship is terrible -You can’t even call it a relationship -She’s got daddy issues out the aft -Blames him for everything that happened to you, which he happily reinforced with his self-depreciating lifestyle -Bee also low-key blames Ratchet for taking his mom away. He understand it’s not his fault, it was an accident, but you were gone for 30 years. -Echo is absurdly attached to the gaggle of humans that raised them, even more so than Bee. -She’s even more attached to Optimus, follows him around like a lost puppy and craves his approval -Which isn’t that hard to earn because he adores her. -He struggles with her grudge against her biological sire, though. Because no matter what he’s never found it in himself to blame Ratchet, and has tried, to little avail, to turn her towards him. -She’s shown considerable proficiency in medicine, but refuses to study it seriously because it’s what “that guy” does and FUCK “That guy”. -You know it’s not entirely your responsibility to fix her and Bee’s opinion of Ratchet -But it’s an enormous fucking mess and the burden’s going to be way easier if shared
-You go to Optimus for help -Because, aside from the humans, he’s the one who basically raised these two. -Alone -That cannot have possibly been easy -That cannot have possibly left him without some damage -He’s been kind, but distant ever since you awakened -Seems to be reluctant to speak to you alone -But once you have him alone, he breaks down -Sweeps you up in his hands -begs you to just let him hold you -He missed you. He missed you so fucking bad -He never told Ratchet about the time you two merged. Or the bond he formed with Echo because of it -Or the kiss -The guilt that comes over his face when bringing this up breaks your heart -You can’t take it anymore
-You go to Ratchet -You tell him about the dream in blinding detail -He looks like he’s watching a slow motion train crash when you bring it up, but he remembers every last vivid bit as though it were yesterday -Admits it was the happiest he’d ever been and waking up felt like getting kicked out of heaven -Admits he never actually wanted to break up with Optimus -Admits those feelings resurfaced when you were sick and Optimus was the only one he’d let anywhere near him -Admits that made him feel even worse because you were fucking dying -Probes you for your feelings for Optimus -This time you break -Fall to your knees and start fucking sobbing -You’ve loved this mech ever since you first laid eyes on him -Ever since fate determined you’d bring that tiny yellow sparkling from the brink of death -Being apart from him makes you feel like a plant without water. You’re shriveling up and drying out. -You need him. You don’t want to be apart anymore. -You tell Ratchet about the merge. The bond. The kiss. -Ratchet looks about as relived as he does devastated -Relived, because you want Optimus as badly as he still does -Devastated because he made himself physically unavailable for Echo to form that bond -He knows forming that bond with Optimus was probably the best thing that could have possibly happened to her at the time -But he also knows it happened because he fucked up and continued to fuck up for thirty whole ass years and his daughter wants nothing to do with him and it’s completely his fault -You tell him as kindly as possible, that yeah, he’s right, but also to shut the fuck up. -If she knew what he’d been through, she’d understand. -It’s gonna take a long time and a whole lot of work, but it’s not too late to fix this. -It’s also not too late to fix things with Optimus, and that probably won’t take as much work
-Since that’s the easier of the two tasks by far, that’s the one you guys start with -Both you and Ratchet corner him in the infirmary after he comes back from a mission a little banged up -Tell him in plain fucking english you both remember the dream, both want him romantically and carnally, both willing to move mountains to make this work, and if you don’t want Elita to make good on her threat you’d better sort this shit out now -Optimus doesn’t need any further convincing -Fucks you both till you see Primus and pass out.
-Now that you’ve made headway on sorting your relationship shit out, -It’s time to start sorting the parenting shit out -With the three of you working together, it’s a lot less overwhelming -Bee, emotionally mature as he is, winds up working through his grievances with Ratchet pretty easily -He never wanted to hold a grudge against him to begin with, and was pretty eager to drop it when given sufficient reason -That, and the fact that his dad, (who he’d been goading to confess to for years) has finally hooked up with his mom makes him pretty happy. -Echo is far less easy to appease -For a while, it actually gets worse, since she’s jealous of the time you and Optimus spend with Ratchet -But because of the time you’re spending together, it makes it harder for her to avoid him
-She asks you one day “what the frag you could possibly see in him” while she’s simultaneously re-calibrating the ground bridge resonance controls and running an experimental distillation on synthetic red energon -Staring stupidly with your mouth open at the similarities, you tell her -”Right now, I see you. Goddamn you’re just like him.” -She snaps her wrench in half, growls and kicks the shards across the room. -“Like him? I can’t fraggin’ stand him!” -You sigh. “He can’t stand himself either.” -She makes a face like she knows you have a point but isn’t willing to admit it even to herself, and that’s the exact same face Ratchet made when you told him you wanted to keep her.
-She finally approaches Ratchet the next day -Just walks up to him while he’s in the lab, drags a stool over and sits down -”So apparently we both hate ourselves” -Ratchet stops what he’s doing. -“What could you possibly hate yourself for?” -”Besides the obvious?” “-What obvious-?” “I’m the reason mom was in a coma.” -Ratchet drops his wrench. And his jaw -Tries to tell her that’s bullshit. -She won’t let him get a word in edgewise -”And I know you hate yourself for that too.” -He doesn’t even try to deny that one -”Hating you for the same reason I hate myself makes it easier to hate myself. And I…don’t want to hate myself anymore.” -Ratchet.exe has stopped working -She tells him she has absolutely not forgiven him for being practically non-existent in her life, and she’s not sure if she ever will but- -Maybe she doesn’t have to, to move on. -Maybe they can acknowledge this as a massive-ass problem that will keep coming back and never fully be resolved -And maybe they can move forward despite it -And despite both of them trying exceedingly hard not to be, they’ve wound up extremely similar, so -Maybe learning not to hate themselves will be easier if they do it together. -She tells him in spite of everything she still wants to like him. So bad. -Ratchet finally stops, and turns to look at her. -She’s gritting her denta, digging her digits into the side of the seat so hard it cracks, and holding back tears. -He tells her, after several tries to get his mouth working again, that he wants to give her a reason to like him. -”Yeah well-” she shakily pries her servos off the seat, jumps down, picks up his wrench and hands it back to him. “I guess we have the rest of our lives to figure that out.” -Her hands brush his as she hands the wrench back, and for the first time, she doesn’t recoil or jerk them away. -She leaves -He stands there for a whole thirty seconds after she leaves staring at the wrench before setting it down on the desk -Then putting his helm down on the desk -And starts crying harder in relief then he’s ever cried in his life
