Chapter Text
23 – Steve’s Job
Just out of the shower, Daniel, a crimson-red towel in his head, dressed in a pair of equally scarlet pyjamas with black slippers, squinted at his own room as he took sight of the unbecoming cot by the door, instantly remembering.
Soldier Brock, no, Leo, was going to sleep here from now on while that decepticon threat remained in the base.
Finally climbing up his barely-better-than-a-cot bed, he picked his tablet from the desk and turned it on, groaning: he had an insistent message glowing in awful-green at the notification bar.
Scrolling it up and unlocking the tablet, it opened directly at the intranet’s chat system, no-one-less-than Nurse June Darby’s chat window popping up on his screen.
“Greetings, First-Lieutenant Dr. Pitanguy: Commander Fowler authorized me to schedule a couple of patients early in the morning for you. Make sure to be here 0600 pronto. Second-Lieutenant Nr. Darby out.”
Grimacing for a couple of seconds, Daniel finally groaned, counting to ten, then formally replied that he would be there with his bodyguard at the scheduled time, turning the tablet’s volume off and flipping its screen down on the night-stand, unwilling to have anything to do with such awful news until he must again.
There was a reason why he became an army surgeon, instead of an army clinician.
Surgery patients in army situations were often more dead than alive, usually in too much pain to do anything beyond screaming when not anaesthetised thus not exactly prone to idle chatter, which suited Daniel very well: he didn’t graduate in medicine due to the goodness of his heart, and he hated people.
Why medicine then?
Why, financial stability, obviously.
It was a bit too late to be born rich and not have to do any actual, hard, physical work for a living: despite being reasonably good looking for his current age (he absolutely did not look 43!), he had absolutely no intention to marry off any wrinkled, obnoxious, loud, old hag, much less any stinky, disgusting, bald old sod, no matter how moribund, to chance inheriting wealth: he had standards.
He needed a profession that paid better than average, in a field where preferably The Government would actually pay for him to study, and then keep paying for him to work afterwards.
Few professions beat Medicine in that regard.
Fortunately or unfortunately he found his calling in Surgery: he had always been praised for his manual skill and impeccable sense of aesthetics, added to his quick thinking and capability for improvisation.
Pay no mind, Daniel was a very good clinician, but clinical patients have a tendency to complain that they are in pain, they request refills for their medication, they want - perish the notion! - work leave, and they keep returning for further appointments and reviews.
He couldn’t be made to care about their little daily problems, not enough to see himself opening up a private clinical practice.
Now, a surgical business would be something else entirely, but there was a problem with that.
He needed to have money to make money.
How could he advertise himself when he had no way to pay for it without undergoing crippling debt?
Even considering Uncle Sam paid for his studies, even considering one day he would leave the Army debt free… he couldn’t fathom where he would go to practice surgery like he wished and deserved.
Who would pay him for doing plastic surgery when he had no practice beyond stitching up grunts? How was he getting into a fellowship without official letters of recommendation from prestigious Medical Schools?
Certainly, his curriculum as Army Surgeon would take him a few places.
Just not the places he wanted to be.
Which only left him working for The Government.
Ah well.
Taking a last glance at his silently sleeping bodyguard, nodding in appreciation at the loaded and hopefully safety-locked rifle resting against the wall, Daniel finally placed his favourite crimson sleeping-eye-mask, turning on his right side and reluctantly drifting to sleep.
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Currently sitting at the foot of his patient’s assigned bed, Hook had managed to mmicry by spark the motions of the hands hypnotically massaging the feet depicted into the video Soundwave showed him with the datapad.
Place both thumbs at the dorsal surface of the foot, press and slide the skin into the shin until the knee, slowly going up.
Stop.
Lift thumbs, move down, now slightly to the right, sliiiiiiiide back up.
Thumbs back down, this time a bit to the left, sliiiiiide up.
Change foot.
Repeat.
Only the sound of the sliding fingers and Ravage’s own purring filled the room, until the sound of sliding came to a full stop.
Opening his golden eyes, Ravage squinted at the bed, actually raising a corner of his mouth in the closest approximation of a smirk he could muster as a panther at the sight.
Quite impressed, he stretched, briefly raked his claws on the ground, then rose his front paws at the bed, face coming level with the mattress.
Soundwave, famed to never recharge (he did, obviously, but it’s the sentiment that counts), was in fact silently so, right foot propped up Hook’s lap, the other foot and a hand both hanging out of the bed, right hand currently resting atop the huge pregnant belly, rising up and down with every breath.
Hook, famed for never leaving an unfinished job, was hopelessly slumped ahead, chin pressing against the base of his neck, both hands loosely gripping Soundwave’s right foot, eyes closed and mouth slack open, snoring.
Watching closely the constructicon’s face, Ravage tilted his head, coming close and actually sniffing him, opening his mouth in a Flehmen response, taking notice of the tiny thick hairs starting to show in the man’s chin, upper lips and sides of the face, puzzled.
Moving to Soundwave’s face, he slowly sniffed it, also opening his mouth to better analyse what he was taking in, finally getting to a worrying conclusion.
Summoning the mental image of blue and purple sparks to mind, he shook his head, mentally cursing the lack of access to an inner comm, silently walking to the door, testing the door handle once and quite glad to find it unlocked.
Stopping by the open door for about to five full clicks, undecided between going back inside or leaving, tail swishing back and forth, lashing right and left, Ravage finally left the room, turning to grab the handle with his fangs walking backwards until the door closed, wondering where he could find a computer terminal with a keyboard large enough for him to use his paws.
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Soldier Steve hummed to himself as he cartwheeled dirty laundry from all around the base.
Initially worried for being chosen to stay behind as part of the skeleton crew, responsible for readying the MRE rations, filling the juicer, pre-cleaning and placing dirty silverware and cookware at the dishwasher, and supplying the laundry, he was quite glad to know he was allowed to do his work work during the graveyard shift without needing to keep any direct contact with the aliens.
All he had to do was to keep the wheels turning in the base. Once everything was over, Commander Fowler promised, he would get promoted.
Ha.
He knew very well what promotion meant. More work and more responsibilities for practically the same pay.
Stopping by the communal washracks to get the towels those decepticons used, he put on a pair of disposable nitrile gloves, a disposable TNT mask, a disposable TNT coat, and opened the door.
As far as he understood, those aliens had come from a planet called Cybertron: some were as huge as whole fucking planets, a size-scale so unfathomable to the layperson that even though Steve was graduated in philosophy and considered himself fairly open to new ideas and concepts, he could hardly digest the very notion of transforming sentient robots the size of Earth belonging to the same race of beings as the ones that could turn into assorted vehicles from cranes and freight trucks to jets and helicopters and tanks, going through static objects as tiny as a gun or a micro-cassette-recorder, and even others could be as tiny as a micro-cassette or a pendrive, not to mention those that can actually turn into animal simulacra, all of them rational like humans.
Cautiously stepping inside, taking care not to touch anything with ungloved hands, he made quick work of the towels, filling the cart up and getting a huge bottle of hydrochloric solution, walking by the walls and spraying every single surface he could with it.
As soon as the protocol interval of 10 minutes was over, he would fully hose the walls and surfaces with water, then proceed to the Mess Hall.
Once everything was finished, he would take his own shower at the maintenance crew’s personal facilities: he could barely wait to finally be able to go to sleep.