"Is this going to hurt?" Scrapper asked nervously as he waited up on jacks. A rack of neatly-organized cutters rested far too near to his shovel, and he couldn't help picking out what order Hook would use them in to flay him open.

Hook gave him an irritated glance as he laid out the various parts he would need for this installation. "I am taking your damage-control computers offline for this surgery, just as I have done for the past four similar ones. You won't feel a bit of pain."

Scavenger reached out and stroked one of Scrapper's rear wheels. "It's true, you won't feel anything. Well, besides panic if Hook says 'oops' again."

The excavator still looked a little odd to Scrapper's sight. He'd requested that Hook not hide the connector under his plating, so it sat squarely out on his chest for anyone to see. It was pleasantly sensitive, too, as he'd watched Long Haul and Bonecrusher discover shortly after Scavenger's own installation surgery.

Hook glanced skyward in disdain. "I did not say 'oops'. You wouldn't have even known something had gone wrong if Mixmaster had kept his mouth shut."

"I don't want my damage-control computers turned off, Hook."

The crane paused in his work. "Unfortunately, you are going to get what you don't want."

Scrapper revved his engine. "Look, if my computers are down, I won't know if you've done anything dangerously wrong."

Hook gave him a sound smack on the flat of his shovel blade. "You've helped me do the last four of these, idiot. If you don't trust me to do this by now, then I certainly cannot trust you when it's my turn."

"It's not that..."

"Then what is it? If you don't want to go through with this, just say so!"

And there it was again. The same offer that Hook had made each and every single one of his workmates multiple times before beginning the installation work. Hook didn't want to do this. His workmate really and truly did not want to be doing these tricky, tricky installations because when he was done with Scrapper, it'd be his turn to go under the knife.

Hook might trust them to do the installation surgery right, but he'd made it clear that he didn't want to do what would come next.

"It's for Omega Supreme," Scrapper said quietly. "We're doing this for Omega Supreme. Because we love him, and we know-"

"We suspect," Hook interrupted.

"We know!" Scavenger insisted, daringly reaching out to grab one of Hook's hands. "We know he does!"

"He loves us," Scrapper finished firmly. "Do what you need to do, Hook."

"Very well."

Hook did not retrieve his hand from Scavenger, Scrapper noted with a sense of relief. As unhappy as Hook was with their proposed plan, he wasn't unhappy enough to leave. If Hook wouldn't walk out over this, they could bring him around to the idea still.

"Well? How'd it go?"

Studying his newly modified legs was interrupted as Mixmaster flung himself onto the outstretched limbs. Scrapper groaned at the sudden weight on his still tender legs. As nice and painless as 'installation surgery' sounded on paper, it didn't change the fact that Hook had basically sawed off most of the back half of his vehicle mode, rebuilt it, reattached it, and then made some minor modifications to the way his arms could go while still keeping him mostly a payloader.

"It went fine, Mixmaster. Nobody died." Scrapper shifted a leg helplessly underneath his workmate and hoped the mixer would take the hint.

No such luck. "About time, you bum. Think you can help me talk Long Haul into trying a partial transformation with these new modes? He's being balky, even when I drag him into a closet, and he won't take any drinks from me or Scavenger!"

"Drugging co-workers is against company policy," Scrapper reminded him.

"Pfeh!" Mixmaster waved a hand dismissively. "Like anyone pays attention to that."

"Mixmaster, you're the only person it applies to."

"Whatever. And how's our dear little wayward crane doing? Did you manfully rub his hands until he was overcome with desire and agreed to do whatever you wanted?"

Scrapper didn't think 'disagrees with our not-entirely-sane plan' qualified Hook as wayward in any sense of the word. "I just came out of a large-scale intallation surgery, Mixmaster. I wasn't up to letting him do anything to me, much less me doing anything to him. Manfully or not."

The mixer just covered his optics with one hand and let his mixing drum rumble in the most put-upon manner. "Scrapper, Scrapper, Scrapper... This is why I got to him before you did. Heck, Bonecrusher got to him before you did!"

"Bonecrusher got to him before you did, too, I seem to recall."

The door to the lounge dilated open, letting in a blast of acidic rain and another workmate.

"Speak of the devil," Mixmaster chirped and leaned forward a bit to wave. "Hey, Bonecrusher! We were just talking about you!"

"Yeah?" Bonecrusher shook himself, sending a spray of light acid everywhere. "What about?"

Scrapper took the opportunity to shove Mixmaster off his legs. The clatter of his workmate against the floor and Mixmaster's squawk of protest were music to his audials. "Are the new parts behaving correctly, Bonecrusher? Are they hurting at all? Any problems?"

"Nah." Bonecrusher grabbed a cube out of the footlocker and hurled himself onto a stool. It rocked dangerously for a few moments before settling. "Didn't hurt when you two got done with me, doesn't hurt now. Why? Yours still bugging you?"

Mixmaster slapped Scrapper's leg hard, making the payloader groan. "Sounds like it!"

"Wuss."

Scrapper cycled air out with a sighing sound. "You'll let us know if you start having any problems, won't you, Bonecrusher?"

"Yeah, sure," Bonecrusher lied. They all knew it was a lie, but it made Scrapper feel a little better to go through the motions. Besides, it probaby wasn't much of a lie, since Bonecrusher didn't think dropping buildings on his head caused problems either.

There wasn't much point in pressing the bulldozer about it, so Scrapper turned his attention to more important matters. "Is Long Haul out in the weather?"

"Naw."

Mixmaster sauntered over to the footlocker and sat down on it. "He's on a supply run. We still need some specialty pieces from Saganaki to finish our work, remember?"

"Saganaki?" Bonecrusher gave them both a confused glower. "That's slagging far out of the way. Anything we need for this podunk job can be flown in from- Oh. Right."

Scrapper still wasn't sure if dropping buildings on his own head was a cause or a symptom of Bonecrusher's... Bonecrusherness. But at least the bulldozer did get things if glared at hard enough.

"Are you certain you have everything required?" Hook shifted nervously on the jacks, his wheels spinning uselessly as they held him off the floor.

"You better have everything! I ain't hauling in any more of this stuff, Scrapper," Long Haul groused as he sorted out the larger component pieces needed for the installation. "Got enough funny looks from our suppliers over all this stuff."

Scrapper involuntarily glanced at Hook's cab at that little tidbit. "None of them know everything we bought, do they? You were careful-"

"O' course I was careful! A little here, a little there, and I been collectin' this stuff for a decade! Ain't no one who'd notice," Long Haul snapped.

"But if they're looking at you oddly," Hook began before getting interrupted by the dump truck.

"It was Swindle, arright? He went Decepticon, and you know what a little ice-cooled mercenary he's always been. Sell out his own drinking buddy for an extra pint of fuel."

"He went Decepticon?" Hook's headlights flashed in surprise. "He never struck me as the type."

Long Haul shrugged. "His bodyguard went first, I hear. An' Swindle can't do some of his deals if he don't got Brawl."

Scrapper fiddled with the laid out tools. He had everything he needed, had more than he needed, really. But putting away the extra pieces gave him a little more time to work up the courage to tell Hook how he was going to do this.

"Look," he said after he'd discarded some of his tools and neatened his workspace twice. "I'm going to put you under for this."

"What?!" Hook transformed and half-fell off the jacks. "No! I refuse!"

"It's for your own good! You know you're a terrible patient when you're the one under the knife, and neither I nor Long Haul need you trying to 'help' when we're doing something this complicated." Scrapper reached out and took hold of Hook's hands, clasping them gently. "It'll be easier for all of us this way. Trust us."

"Don' know why you've had such a problem with this in the first place," Long Haul grumbled. "We're not gonna be doing merges every other year or anything. We haven't even gotten up to Crystal City in a handful of decades."

Hook extricated his hands from Scrapper's clasp, scowling at them both. "We don't know Omega feels such for us..."

Long Haul backfired his engine deliberately in contemptuous disbelief. "Like slag he doesn't! You're just scared."

"We need to go up to Crystal City to do some maintenance work next month," Scrapper noted. "The foundation of the north wall needs shoring up. We could bring it up then. If you're right, Hook, then we never need to use the merge. And if the rest of us are right, we'll have everything in place. So can you please just transform back and let me put you under?"

"Very well." Hook transformed to his crane-mode once again and allowed Long Haul to manhandle him back onto the jacks. "But we will speak to him first."

"Of course." Scrapper reached inside of Hook's cab and unlatched a maintenance panel, then toggled off the crane's higher cognitive functions. "All right, Long Haul, let's get this done."

-End-