#robot-thighs

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Brainstorm's left wing and remaining dignity were both hanging by a thread. The mech himself, unfortunately, was hanging by rather more than a thread: he was stuck in his own harness, dangling from the roof of his workshop.

"It's a bit sexy, isn't it?" He stroked an absent beard over the flat plane of his faceplate.

Perceptor stood on the work bench beneath him, bracing up the wing with his shoulder as he tried to disentangle a strap from its sparking insides.

Being able to see what he was doing would have enabled him to enjoy the power of a knife, but since he couldn't, and the wing was already sparking at its joint, he had to shove his fingers into the mysterious shadows inside Brainstorm's shoulder armour and attempt a manual disentangling.

His hands were wet with leaking fuel from where the strap had cut into Brainstorm's fuel supply. He had a very narrow aerofoil and it wasn't going well.

"Sexy?" Perceptor repeated dubiously. Getting stuck in his own ridiculous harness? The one he built so he could dangle from the roof to, somehow, impress Perceptor? "Brainstorm, it's not even smart."

The wing tensed under his fingers, creaking ominously as it tried to sag expressively. Brainstorm's sulking actually deepened his access, and he found a strap of distinctly non-biological cabling at last. From there, he began to follow it with his fingers.

"Ha! I should have known you'd need something to be smart to be sexy. We're so alike." Were they? Were they? "But," he went on, "it's pretty smart." He winced as Perceptor shoved, trying to stopper the fuel leak even as he sought out the rogue straps of the harness. This did not stop him talking. "Who else do you know who can engineer atrocities upside down?"

"I'd be impressed if you managed to do it upside down using a stable antigravity field," Perceptor offered, half-sparked and through his teeth, because it seemed marginally better than telling him nobody except you thinks that's an achievement, actually.

"Ohh. What a thought. Noted," said Brainstorm.

"It wasn't a request." If Perceptor's voice was terse and clipped, could anyone really blame him? Really?

He stretched up on his toes for a moment, heaving his shoulder beneath Brainstorm's wing and shifting it for just long enough to get his fingers around that one strap. When he relaxed back onto his heels, the sudden weight of Brainstorm's wing compressed his hand.

"Ouch," said Brainstorm, but not really as though it hurt. "I'm surprised," he added, "I thought you'd be all over me! Dangling from the ceiling, entirely at your mercy."

The frustrating thing was that he wasn't wrong. Perceptor didn't mind the idea of Brainstorm getting stuck in his ridiculous harness, exactly. He could have paced in slow, deliberate circles beneath his conjunx's helpless frame, listening to him whine to be set free.

That had a certain appeal.

But he wasn't just stuck. He hadn't called Perceptor when he was just stuck. He'd panicked, tried to unstick himself, and twisted himself up until something had cracked and there was fuel slowly drooling from his wing. He'd only sent a comm when his wires had started throwing sparks inches from an open fuel source.

And nobody liked to show up to find their conjunx bleeding onto the floor, one wrong move from accidental self-immolation.

Perceptor didn't dignify this comment with an answer. He pulled on his strap instead, trying to find where it had any give. It tightened the rest of the cables around Brainstorm and set him gently to spinning, somehow, which he did without much grace.

Perceptor ducked to avoid getting a wing to the face. The wing he'd been bracing up creaked and bent, sagging down with the draw of gravity. Brainstorm didn't wail and complain about the pain. Instead his optics whited out in complete silence, which Perceptor thought might have been worse.

"I'm going to cut it," he decided.

"Bold. Strategic. Incisive. Good idea." Brainstorm spun another slow rotation on the spot, helpless before the forces of physics. The forces of physics were probably due a win over Brainstorm at this point, anyway, really. He defied them often enough under regular circumstances.

"I might clip something," he warned. He pulled his hand out. It was slippery with energon, and the stain glowed under the strong laboratory lighting.

"Wow, okay, no, bad idea. Terrible idea. No. No?"

Perceptor ignored this and jumped down from the work bench. He came back a moment later carrying the the wire cutters.

"Percy," Brainstorm squirmed, which did not make it any easier to find the right cable to snip by feel alone. "Hey, Percy, come on."

"Don't flap."

Brainstorm, apparently sensing the futility of his wriggling, instead went very still. Perceptor dug his slippery fingers back into the shadows of the wing joint, seeking out the loop of cabling.

He knew he'd found the right one, because tugging it set Brainstorm to slow spinning again.

"I think I'm getting seasick."

"I'll just be a moment." He couldn't see, but he could feel his way along the cable. He clamped the wire cutters and pressed down slowly, waiting for Brainstorm to tell him it hurt. He did not, so Perceptor took that as encouragement. He braced Brainstorm's sagging wing up with his own shoulder again and cut the cable.

Snip.

There was a whistle as the strap finally came free, and Brainstorm made a tank-churning noise of pain as the broken ends dragged through his injured wing where they'd cut in.

"Wait," he said, in such a tone that Perceptor looked up in alarm, but it was already too late: the other harness cables, suddenly given all of his weight and without their fellow to help, could not hold up.

Snap, snap, snap, went the harness, and Brainstorm thrashed his good wing, trying to twist to hold onto it, but—there was a creak—he swung and spun—snap!—and then tumbled down from the ceiling to crash onto Perceptor, who was right below.

They fell in a crash and clatter of metal limbs onto the workbench, where one of Perceptor's flailing feet knocked the miniature model of his own alt mode off the bench to thunk onto the floor. It lay there on its side and was quickly forgotten.

Then, silence.

For a few moments there was no sound but the settling noises of living metal and the dull whir of hard-working processors. Perceptor could keenly feel where Brainstorm's canopy had dented his flatter chestplate. He let his head tip back to rest upon the bench: thump.

He stared up at the tangled mess that had been Brainstorm's harness. The cables and straps swayed gently above, looking wholly innocuous. One of them was shiny with fuel.

"...Bracing!" said Brainstorm lightly. He clamped his fingers over the leak in his wing. He was much better at finding it than Perceptor had been, given that he could actually feel it. He tipped his head so he too could see the carcass of his harness. "I'm gonna have to fix all that."

Something crackled and his wing joint sparked, a bright little fleck of golden light near Perceptor's face.

"You mean you're going to need to dismantle it."

"...Right! Yes. That. I'll need to dismantle it. Especially since," he added, shooting a sly look at Perceptor, "I have to make the antigravity field."

Perceptor did not take the bait. "Was seeing First Aid somewhere in this game plan?"

"Sure," said Brainstorm, sounding distinctly like someone who wasn't listening to a word Perceptor had said. "But now that I'm free, you can tell the truth... It was a bit sexy, wasn't it?"