Work Text:
They’re stuck.
Impossibly, hopelessly, stuck.
It does not often happen that with their collective processing power, Perceptor and Brainstorm find themselves unable to continue in their work simply because they have no idea what the problem is. Perceptor is too calculated and particular about his methods to lose himself so thoroughly and though Brainstorm is not nearly as careful, his tenaciousness makes him absolutely ruthless when it comes to any blockade they run into.
But when they do run into one, they run into it hard.
Both of them are currently sitting on the floor. The pieces of the prototype of Brainstorm’s newest idea, a temporal displacement blaster, lay scattered between them. Brainstorm himself has been tossing his faceplate (which he’s been wearing less and less lately, much to Perceptor’s enjoyment) up and down for the last two hours. But now, the motion has been stifled by a terrible dullness slowly glazing over his optics. It’s a decidedly haunting look on him. He is all movement, all forward motion. He brings life, energy, to their lab just by existing in its space. To see him stagnant instills Perceptor with a profoundly unsettling sense of wrong.
Something must be done.
Perceptor cycles his scope. “One more time,” he sighs, breaking the silence, “you are—”
“We are,” Brainstorm cuts in listlessly, “we’ve been sitting together on the floor long enough that I think I can constitute this as a co-project.”
“We,” continues Perceptor, “are attempting to make a weapon that creates user-controlled temporal pockets which temporarily freeze the matter contained within it in a particular moment of time.”
“Time bubbles, yep.”
“And the issue…”
“The issue,” Brainstorm says dully, “is that everything that’s in motion when we put it in the time bubbles comes out all screwy.”
“‘Screwy’ is hardly the appropriate terminology, but… yes.”
Brainstorm groans and hurls his mask across the room. It skitters away with a clatter and vanishes beneath a shelf. “I don’t get it!” he laments. “I could make time-travel happen, so why can’t I make a fraggin’ pause button? It’s basically the same thing!”
Perceptor frowns and gingerly lays a servo on Brainstorm’s pauldron. When he doesn’t react, he says, “Time travel, until you, was an unexplored science. You’re the first, and the first ones never have it easy. We’re bound to run into troubles.”
Brainstorm smiles, but his wings sag dejectedly. “We’re unstoppable together, Percy. When you’re with me, I can invent, and make, and do literally anything. Anything,” he says quietly, “except this, I guess.”
Perceptor’s mouth opens, but no response comes out. He should be flattered—and he is—but it’s difficult to accept when Brainstorm’s field practically writhes with frustration and bitterness that’s clearly directed at himself.
“We’ll figure it out,” he says, “I’m helping you see this endeavor through until the end.”
Brainstorm’s gaze burns when he meets it for a second too long, so he shutters his optics and focuses them down on the pieces of the prototype on the floor. Data. Review the data. Doing it again can’t hurt.
Trial #07, recorded at 15:01:29. Matter (1.0 x 1.0 x 1.0 mechanometer cube of aluminum) placed on pedestal. Upon firing, temporal displacement gun disappeared. Suspect a fault within the barrel caused gun to misfire and hit itself with a temporal pocket. Unable to locate and retrieve it. Trial discontinued.
Trial #22, recorded at 18:44:17. Matter (1.0 x 1.0 x 1.0 mechanometer cube of aluminum) placed on pedestal. Fired upon by temporal displacement gun. Temporal pocket successfully created around matter. Pocket was then terminated because Brainstorm disliked the color.
Note: This decision was not made with unanimous agreement.
Trial #58, recorded at 23:14:18. Matter (1.0 x 1.0 x 1.0 mechanometer cube of aluminum) launched 15 meters into air at 70-degree angle. Fired upon by temporal displacement gun. Matter successfully placed inside temporal pocket. Matter is ‘frozen’ in position. When released from temporal pocket, matter becomes intangible. Appearance ‘glitches’ between prediction position from calculated trajectory and original position. ‘Glitch’ flickers rapidly and seemingly randomly. Unable to reverse effect.
Trial #59… {in progress}
Uncharacteristically, his mind begins to wander. Maybe the hours of relentlessly hacking away at this project have dulled the sharp focus he typically has. A conversation he hadn’t meant to overhear between Tailgate and Swerve on one night at the bar begins to play.
“You’d think we’d have figured out how to get better interstellar WiFi by now,” Tailgate was complaining. “I’ve lost so many games because I keep lagging!”
“What I’m hearing,” Swerve said as he expertly swiped a rag around a cube, “is the sonorous anthem of a bad player.”
“No! You need to come over tonight, I’ll show you how bad it is in my hab suite…”
“You’ve got a thinking face on.”
“I do not have a thinking face.”
“Everyone has a thinking face. Yours is like—you go mm”—Brainstorm frowns a little bit—“and your scope kinda points down more.”
“Does it?” Brainstorm’s been paying that kind of attention to him?
“Yep. What’re you thinking?”
Perceptor chews on his glossa. “This is,” he begins warningly, “frankly, a whim—”
“Hey, I’d take Swerve’s ideas at this point. Pit, I’d take Whirl’s, and he suggested a gun that fired guns the other cycle.” Brainstorm twists around so that he’s facing Perceptor and plants his chin on his servos. “Hit me.”
“Alright… Forgive me for the crude phrasing, but the way these objects are behaving reminds me of Tailgate’s video games.”
Brainstorm links his digits together and nods thoughtfully. “...Yeah, you’re gonna have to give me more here.”
“Do you recall what issue he used to complain about until you’d fixed it?” he tries.
“His game was being slow? What’s this got to do with anything?”
“Bear with me. Tailgate described it as ‘lagging’, yes?” Brainstorm nods with one brow ridge raised. “In that context, it essentially meant that his game fell behind what was actually happening.”
“I’m familiar with the term,” Brainstorm says wryly. “He only whined about it to me three times a cycle for eighty-five cycles straight.”
Perceptor cracks a smile. “Then you could tell me why it happened and how you fixed it.”
“Are you serious?”
“When am I not?”
Brainstorm chuckles. “Fair enough. It was an easy fix. I could have done it with my optics turned off. His suite happened to be just on the edge of the range of the router, so it kept cutting in and out. I just gave him his own extension… based off the ship’s… Oh. Ohh. ”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but the lag occurred when the connection was too poor. Everything in Tailgate’s game—from his perspective—stopped at the moment the connection dropped.” Perceptor looks to Brainstorm, who nods. “Anything else within the game continued to react with the environment unaffected because it wasn’t having the same issue. When the connection stabilized, everything in Tailgate’s game rapidly sped back up to what was actually happening.”
“Right…”
Perceptor sets his shoulders. “I suspect something similar is happening with these temporal pockets. When the pocket is activated, it creates its own timeline for everything inside that moves asynchronously with this one.”
Brainstorm’s optics begin to glimmer. “Keep going,” he says as he drags the pieces of the prototype towards him and begins to swiftly reassemble them.
Invigorated, Perceptor straightens and leans towards Brainstorm. “Once the matter is placed inside the bubble,” he explains, “it enters its own timeline. It splits off from this one”—he gestures broadly to their lab—“for the lifespan that the pocket exists. Like this.” He flashes a crude diagram onto the floor from his scope featuring a thick, straight line. “Here is the alpha timeline, using ourselves as a reference frame. It’s also the one the matter is in before the creation of the temporal distortion pocket.” He begins to draw a thinner line that branches off from the first. “This moment,” he continues, pointing at where the thick and the thin one connect, “is where the bubble is created. This new line is the new beta timeline the matter is in. But the issue is that when we create the pocket”—he erases the point of connection—“instead of staying tethered to the alpha timeline, the matter becomes more or less stranded in the beta one.”
Brainstorm shivers. “You’re the smartest fragging mech on this ship, you know that? I barely know what you’re talking about. It’s amazing. Keep going.”
Perceptor forces down the pleased swelling of his spark. Brainstorm practically invented all of the concepts he was talking about, and he calls Perceptor the smart one? “My theory for our problem is this: when we attempt to free the material inside of the bubble, it continues to behave as though it is within the beta timeline. Interactions with it become difficult because to us, it’s in a new position—at least, it should be—but to the matter inside the pocket, it has not moved.”
Brainstorm nods, slowly at first, then faster and faster. “Yeah… yeah! Yeah, okay, okay, and then, then…” He snaps his digits together frantically. “So we give it some sort of—some sort of anchor to this timeline. So it’ll still move with it, but like, in tandem, and not as a part of this timeline.” As he speaks, he drags his digit along the thin line, runs it parallel to the thicker line, and then drags it back down. “We just gotta establish a remote connection from this timeline to the bubble.”
“Precisely. If we can manage that, then maybe…” Perceptor trails off with a tilt of his head. Brainstorm stares owlishly for a long moment. His optics blaze to life.
“I have an idea,” he mutters, scrambling to his pedes, “If this works, I swear I’m gonna—Oh my God, hold on—”
He drags Perceptor up, then flies over to his workspace, wings visibly quivering with anticipation. Perceptor can only watch in stunned awe as Brainstorm’s servos fly across the console, twisting, complex equations he’s almost certainly just now invented springing to life across the screen. “I mean,” Brainstorm rambles as he types, “hypothetically, it’s easy. I’ve done it before with my timecase. Of course, that was attached to my body, and this is firing over a distance, and that’s obviously different, but—”
“Sigma, not delta.”
“Thanks, and I played around with some long-distance options with the timecase, you know—”
“Did you?”
“Yeah, but they never were what I really needed. I mean,” Brainstorm scoffs, throwing up one hand while the other continues to work as a blur across the keyboard, “why try to calculate something that would find my exact position in an exact moment in time in the past? That’s like trying to shoot a bullet out of the air five minutes after you fire it. It’s asinine.”
“Yes, it would have been a pain. Your solution was clever, however.”
“So then—this might work? No guarantees. You thought it was clever?”
“Unbelievably so.”
Brainstorm bites his lip and mutters something like, “ You’re unbelievable,” but Perceptor can’t be sure. He doesn’t have the time to question it because Brainstorm pushes off from the console then, and snatches up the blaster. Perceptor finally shakes himself to quit his gawking (though he can’t quite get rid of the fond smile) and strides off to place yet another cube of aluminum onto the launcher they’d been using. When he returns to the firing line, Brainstorm is watching the recalibration bar load with a slightly frantic gleam to his optics.
“Come on,” he mutters, “come on, come on, come on, come on—”
The second the console flashes its confirmation of completion, he practically rips the cable out of the blaster that connected it to the console. It’s bent at an uncomfortably sharp angle at the end, but Brainstorm either does not notice or does not care as he takes aim.
“Ready?”
“Yes.” Perceptor’s spark chamber feels tight. “I’ll be firing on three. One, two, three.” He flicks a switch. Up goes the cube, sailing in a flinty silver arch—
Brainstorms fires. The blast hits the cube dead-on. It freezes at the peak of its arch inside of a cherry red bubble.
Trial #59, recorded at 24:01:47…
“You getting this?”
“Of course.”
“How much time has passed?”
Perceptor tilts his head. “When I finish speaking, it will be approximately ten point eight five two seven seconds since the material has entered the temporal distortion pocket.”
Brainstorm vents harshly. His right pede is tapping anxiously, but his aim is remarkably steady. “Right. I’m gonna release it now.”
A moment passes. Nothing happens.
Perceptor glances at him. “Brainstorm?”
A loud crash of metal reverberates through their lab as the cube hits the ground with a bang! and bounces gracelessly to a stop. The ringing of metal continues on into the shocked silence for a few fragile seconds.
“It worked,” Brainstorm says, dumbfounded. Then he laughs, shortly at first, and then bright and clear. The the radiance of his smile is the most exquisite thing Perceptor’s ever seen. “It worked!”
Perceptor finally releases the vent he’d been holding, only to sputter on his next cycle when Brainstorm drags him into a crushing hug. It’s despairingly brief, but when Brainstorm pushes him away, it isn’t far—just millimeters from his face, from his pretty mouth, Oh Primus—and it’s to place his servos firmly on either side of Perceptor’s helm.
“What—?”
“You’re fragging incredible,” Brainstorm whispers, and he kisses Perceptor full on the mouth.
As far as kisses go, the technique is slightly lacking. Their denta clack, their noses smash together, but he can feel Brainstorm’s victorious grin across his mouth and the giddy rush of he’s-kissing-me! drowns out every other line of code detailing cohesive thought in Perceptor’s processor.
But the moment he comes back to himself enough to reciprocate, cool air ghosts across his damp lips. The space in front of him is empty.
Perceptor resets his optics. Then he does it again. Brainstorm has not vanished into thin air. He’s actually across the lab, face buried in his servos.
“—fragging idiot, what the Pit was that, why, why, did I do that? Couldn’t keep yourself under control, and you do that? What the hell?”
A twinge of hurt plucks at Perceptor’s spark. Had he… not meant to kiss him? Why had he, then? Perceptor sighs. “Brainstorm.”
“Never gonna take my faceplate off again, oh my God —”
“Please just look at me.”
Brainstorm freezes. Slowly, he turns around, shame drawing his shoulders close to his audials. “I can—I can go, if you want,” he blurts.
Perceptor jerks his head back. “What?”
“There’s a bunch of empty labs on this ship. Plus, there’s plenty of other mechs dying to be your lab partner—”
“What?”
“Yeah, seriously, First Aid’s aft-deep in Ratchet’s old work, but he’s a seriously clever mech, I bet you guys would—”
“No, I mean—I don’t want you to change labs, and I don’t want a new lab partner.” Brainstorm stares. Perceptor turns his palms outward placatingly. “All I want is an explanation.”
Brainstorm’s wings droop miserably. He scrubs his forehead with a servo hard enough to leave behind faint orange paint transfers and exvents heavily. “I’m sorry. Really, really sorry. I got excited and sometimes I just—I’m affectionate. That’s, ugh, not an excuse, it’s stupid. I shouldn’t have done it, and I’m sorry.”
But he looks so defeated and upset, and his field is such a horribly tight, dark knot of despair-regret-disappointment, Perceptor cannot help but feel there is something he has purposely left out.
We’re unstoppable together.
Smartest mech on the ship.
You’re unbelievable.
You’re fragging incredible.
…Or Perceptor merely has not been looking into the data deeply enough.
His silence is obviously mistaken by Brainstorm, who laughs lifelessly and says, “I really screwed us up, huh.”
“No,” Perceptor says quickly. He takes a step towards Brainstorm. Then another, and another, until he’s close enough to reach out and hold his servos if he felt so inclined. “You didn’t screw anything up. I forgive you,” he says clearly. Then he politely resets his vocalizer, and quietly adds, “But a little warning next time would be appreciated.”
“Of course, Perc, I—” Brainstorm’s helm snaps up so quickly, Perceptor’s worries if he’s pulled some struts. “Next time?”
“Yes. Next time.”
“You… You?”
“Yes.”
“For real?”
“Yes.”
“...Seriously?”
“For Primus’—” Perceptor curls one digit beneath Brainstorm’s chin. Before he can lose his nerve, he presses his lips to Brainstorm’s. This kiss is not nearly as bruising as their first one, but it’s deeper, and Perceptor still makes damn sure he pours every ounce of yes and want this and real he has in him until he feels Brainstorm begin to literally sink a little under it all. He breaks away then, unable to suppress his smile when he asks, “Is that a sufficient answer?”
Brainstorm makes a noise that sounds like his entire processor deciding to reboot by throwing itself into a body of water. “I dunno,” he says, dazed. “Might need a few more test runs to really be sure it works.”
Perceptor smiles and lifts his arms to loop them around Brainstorm’s shoulders. “I believe,” he says, leaning in, “that can be arranged.”