Over the sixty-thousand vorns of waking experience Wheeljack had, many of the details had been lost to him as well, but certain words and phrases - the things that had jumped out at him even back then - he remembered with surprising clarity, even through the pain, the exhaustion, the terror. The details didn't matter; it was what they had both gained out of it all that did.

He'd not been aware of how tense he still was, despite the decision not to doubt them anymore, until the rest of it drained out at Ratchet's answer. He nodded, a big grin perceivable in his tone and the brightness of his optics. "You were gonna 'quarantine' me in the student lounge until . . . how'd ya put it? My urges to creatively slag myself subsided, or somethin' like that?" He snickered, shaking his head. He could look back now and marvel or just find amusement in it. "I still dunno how we managed ta make it through all that. We shoulda been terminated, like, six times over." He sobered again, though his tone was still light, and nodded again. "So . . . our probability contention - um, the point where our paths diverged - is somewhere later than that. Huh." As fascinating as he was starting to find this, he couldn't deny the relief he felt at that as well.

He looked around the room. "There somewhere we can go an' sit down ta talk? Heh, I'm thinkin' this'll take a whil-...oh, n-no, wait." He frowned as the earlier part of their conversation came back to him. "You've got a medical emergency goin' on right now. You got somethin' you need ta get back to?" He couldn't deny a feeling of disappointment, but . . . the health of others most definitely came first.