I started this to get rid of feels from Predacons Rising, but all it did was give me more feels of a different variety. I hope y'all enjoyed it as much as I did, anyway. Thank you for reading!

○ Cybertronian Units of Time:

Vorn – Orbital cycle; Cybertronian year. [roughly 83 Terran years]
Lunar Cycle – Cybertronian month. 26 lunar cycles in a vorn. [three years and four months]
Quartex – Cybertronian week. 4 quartexes in a lunar cycle. [Roughly 10 months]
Orn – Rotational cycle; Cybertronian day. 23 or so orns in a quartex. [Roughly a fortnight]
Joor – Cybertronian hour. 52 joors in an orn, give or take. [roughly 6 and a half Terran hours.]

what can you defend lying to yourself
there is no shame in falling to your knees
just always make sure to stand back up
so we can see each other again

CHAPTER FIVE

Persephone watched him collect his thoughts with patience people seldom ascribed to her. Like Ratchet himself, she worked to her own schedule, and that schedule tended to be several times faster than anyone else's.

She was his budded child, her spark and frame and coding spun together from him and him alone. She shared his frame type, her little body already showing the stout torso, short legs and broad shoulders of a heavy standard. Her armor was sky-blue and pure eggshell-white. A minor glitch in the code she'd been built from had given her yellow optical filters as a default, red pigment seeping into them from the sides. When she'd first been born, she had been small enough that he could fit her in the palm of his hand with only the tips of her pedes dangling over the side of his wrist. His daughter to the core, tiny and perfect. Carrying her had been an exercise in misery, but the minute he'd been able to hold her in his own arms he'd fallen in love for the second time in his life. Regret had never even been an option.

"It's complicated," he said at last. "After Optimus' death I was… not myself. We were not bonded, but I nevertheless felt as though a part of myself had died along with him. He'd been with me for so long that we were essentially all each other had to connect us to where we'd come from, back before the war. With him gone, I had… nothing."

Persephone's sunny optics flickered in denial. "It was wrong," she said, a mulish set to her face and field. "Even if you don't have anything else, you've always got yourself. That's what Tutor says."

Ratchet smiled down at her. It wasn't a happy smile, his spark lurching painfully in his chest at the idealism radiating from her small frame, but it was a start. "I know intellectually that that wasn't true, but there is a difference between knowing something and feeling it in your spark. My spark has always ruled me, so, when it told me that I had nothing left, I believed it.

"I don't know that you'll ever understand what it felt like. I hope to Primus you never do, because I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy, and you, you're so much more precious to me than anything else." He trailed off, suddenly unsure of where he was going with the story.

Something rustled. He looked down just in time to see Persephone upend the packet of jellies, shaking it until one dropped out into her hand. "They're melting together," she began, and was drowned out by one continuous roll of thunder that lasted nearly a minute. "You're running too hot, Dad."

"I'm baring my spark here," he said drily, scratching the back of her neck. Her engine purred in contentment as she reared back, leaning into the touch. "Can you blame me?"

She made a noncommittal murmur, optics shuttering for a moment. "Jus' lemme put them back on the table."

"How about I do that for you, since I don't have to go cross-country to do it?" he suggested, gently taking the bag from her. Her field was starting to taste of fatigue, the exertion of the day finally getting to her. The chronometer in his HUD flashed the beginning of the midnight shift. He'd usually be chasing her off to her berth around this time, provided he was home.

He made a mental note to take the evening shift off more often. Persephone deserved to have him around as often as was possible.

The storm raged on outside, lightning flickering amongst the gathered clouds. His daughter's optics drooped further closed. He needed to wrap this up, preferably before she dropped into recharge in his arms.

"After a while, I started having dreams," he began, his vocaliser dropping into a somewhat hesitant undertone. He'd never told anyone about them, afraid of their reactions and besides which, each one felt so intensely private, personal and meaningful that it would have been like baring his spark chamber to share them. They didn't feel like his nightmares; in these dreams he felt safe, guarded and protected, the fear that had been a constant fixture of his life since the very beginning of the war a lifetime ago distant and easily ignored.

"What sort of dreams?" Persephone asked, blinking up at him. Her optics dimmed, her engine idling. She tucked her hands beneath her chin and rested her elbows on her knees, her field swirling lazily.

Ratchet smiled. "Good dreams. Optimus was in them. There were sparklings, as well. They started coming just after we met the first troop of newsparks to climb out of the Well, so I thought perhaps that the sparklings I was seeing were a representation of those mecha. I knew that Optimus had given his life so that those newsparks could be born – so, perhaps, there was the subconscious link.

"But I changed my mind after a while. You see, those sparklings weren't just Optimus' – they were mine as well." He vented carefully, his spark pulsing waves of complicated emotion through his systems. "I don't know how I knew that; simply that I did. A long time ago, Optimus had told me that something he wanted more than almost anything else was to see me working with sparklings again. I'd forgotten it almost as soon as he'd said it, but, I don't know, the dreams just brought it all flooding back.

"And so, I thought, that's something I can do for him."

"So you made me," Persephone finished, lifting her helm and meeting his gaze head-on. She didn't smile, but her EM field was suddenly a blur of shortwave activity, edged with gold and underneath it, strokes of vivid affection reaching out against Ratchet's. "For him."

"For me, too," he added. "The more I thought about it, the more I decided that this was something I wanted – needed – to do, for my own sake as well. Cybertron was coming alive again; more and more people were arriving, newsparks were turning up every orn almost, people started kindling again. My friends and comrades were moving onwards, carrying on with the business of living… while I was stuck mourning the past. I felt myself getting left behind. I needed something to focus on that wasn't just another memory of pain."

He had taken an incredible risk in budding her, he knew. If things hadn't worked out in exactly the right way, it could easily have ruined both their lives. He might have withdrawn even further or abandoned her entirely, reminded too much of everything he'd lost – and she would have grown up with a carrier who didn't want her, unloved and rootless, unwelcome at home but with nowhere else to go.

Ratchet shook his helm, banishing the image. The very idea hurt.

"So," he continued, watching her field smooth over as her systems slowly wound down into recharge, "I took an orn's break from work, asked Wheeljack to check on me at the end of the orn – I think he thought I was trying some sort of odd experiment, by the look on his face." That earned a quiet giggle. "Then I made you. I kept you secret for as long as I could – budded sparks are notorious for being reabsorbed into the carrier's body early on in the gestation, you see, and I didn't want to celebrate until I knew you were going to survive."

A solemn nod this time, Persephone's optics flickering on and off as she fought to stay awake with all the stubborn willpower she had. Ratchet smiled, cupping her cheek and audial with his hand. She leaned into the touch, her helm drooping against it.

"You were born in the middle of a storm, twenty-six years and eight months, just over eight lunar cycles ago. It seems like much longer."

Persephone nodded groggily, as if to agree. She mumbled something, reaching up to Ratchet's clavicular struts and holding on tight. He eased himself upright, holding her in place with one servo while the other braced him on the edge of the berth.

She tugged against his armor, sleepy but insistent. He huffed a quiet, affectionate laugh, lifting her up until she could lean forward and press her tiny forehead against his. Moments later, he heard her engine drop down into full recharge-mode.

"I suppose you got to stay up a little late after all," he murmured, tucking her into the crook of his shoulder and easing himself off the berth. No power meant he'd have to manually draw the blinds shut if he wanted to block out the lightning, but Persephone wasn't the only weary mech in the house.

He stood by the berth for a while, watching the electricity play through the spires of Protihex. Persephone vented gently in his arms, and didn't so much as twitch when the thunder rattled the plasglass windows in their frames. He really envied her, sometimes. To him the thunder sounded like bombs and fallen cities; it was sometimes enough to freeze him in his tracks, draw him out of an uneasy recharge.

Persephone would be sleeping in her own berth tonight. He didn't want to risk it against the chance he'd dream of the war again.

He pushed himself into moving, navigating through the darkened apartment via his proximity scanners. Something small crunched underfoot, and he resigned himself to checking in the morning which one of Persephone's much-beloved toys he'd crushed before she stumbled upon it and traumatise herself.

The door to her room was open, the floor inside strewn with datapads and homemade dolls. Ratchet carefully plotted a route through the mess, nudging the pile aside where necessary with a careful pede. She had a full-sized berth, but there was a permanent dent on one side where her small body had worn down the mesh overlay. He kept meaning to replace the covers, but every time he brought the topic up she said that she liked them that way, and whined for the rest of the shift if he tried to prove his point.

Pick your battles, June had said when he'd written to ask her how he ought to deal with it. If it isn't hurting her, and she likes it that way, then why bother? Save the parental wrath for making her tidy her things up instead.

Persephone's vents whuffed gently as he lowered her onto the berth, settling her on her back and drawing the thermoregulator blanket over her small form. Her hands curled into loose fists, one resting over her chest while the other stretched out by her side. Ratchet brushed his fingers over her chevron as he drew back, then stood watching her sleep for a moment. The tiny mobile plates of her face shifted, tiny changes of expression flickering across her visage as she dreamed.

Before long, the call of his own berth grew irresistible. He made his way back through the room, giving her one last look from the doorway. She looked younger than she really was in sleep, her scowls and grins melting away. The hand by her side twitched, digits curling tighter.

Ratchet smiled, and closed the door.

OWARI