Work Text:
"I still can't believe you're keeping that thing," laughed Brainstorm as he finished tightening the cap on the oil reservoir tank, "It's gonna eat you eventually."
"She," Whirl corrected, petting the amorphous blob of red scraplets as they writhed and undulated and purred beneath his touch.
"Well, how do you know that, then?" Brainstorm asked, leaning back and wiping off his servos on his thighs.
"Because she likes it," Whirl responded, "if you call her him or it, she grumbles."
"She does?" Brainstorm asked, peering down at the monstrous beast sitting in his friend's lap, "I guess you've been paying more attention."
"Uh huh."
Brainstorm watched the mass move, wriggling and writhing like some sort of amorphous snake, chittering and purring. "Well, that tank should last you awhile. Dunno what you're gonna do when that runs out, though."
"I'll figure it out," Whirl huffed, "She eats metal. I can figure the rest out from there. "
Brainstorm shrugged, "Fair enough. Well, she's a fascinating little conundrum of a thing as it were, certainly unique, so- if you want, that is- perhaps I can check up on her again at some point, you know, take some more numbers, see if we can't figure out what the old girl needs to keep tip top and all that."
Whirl looked up, blinking his optic steadily, "Yeah, that'd be great, Stormy."
"Stormy?" Brainstorm tittered, arching an eyebrow.
"Yeah, you know. Storm. Brainstorm. It's a nickname. You know of nicknames."
"I s'pose I do," Brainstorm chuckled, "Your name is harder to shorten, so you've left me waffling there."
"Ah, don't worry about it," Whirl waved, "more importantly, what are we gonna call ol' Sparky here? Seein' as she ain't actually got a spark and all, seems a little inappropriate suddenly. Like callin' a monoformer 'Transformy' or somethin'."
"Hm," Brainstorm hummed, reaching down to pat the object of the conversation, who flattened and pulled away from his hand with a threatening hiss, "Uh- well, maybe ask her then, huh?"
"You think she'll learn to talk?" Whirl asked, cooing at her to settle down.
"Well, she can replicate a Cybertronian body near perfectly. If she can replicate a vocalizer and all its parts, why shouldn't it function?"
"Hm," Whirl thought, "Hey, hissy lady, Stormy just helped pack up your lunch for the next few months, you could say thank you without bein' rude, eh?"
The beast whined and squirmed, before making a sound like a sigh, and Whirl laughed. Brainstorm grimaced behind his faceplate, but the temptation to test the waters again pulled him forward to reach toward the mass once more. This time, she allowed herself to be touched, rippling from the spot.
"See? He ain't gonna hurt ya," Whirl chortled, leaning forward to give her a big scratch under where a chin might have been and she made a delighted chittering noise, "Ain't nobody gonna hurt ya, not no more."
"You're gonna get half of Cybertron killed if you mess this up," Brainstorm grinned, chuckling as if he didn't really care if he did.
"Ah, fuck 'em," Whirl scoffed, "Half of Cybertron ain't never given a petrorat's aft about anybody but themselves anyway. She ain't bad for actin' in her nature. Girly ain't had no good reason to save our butts back there in the first place, other than I asked her to. She wants me to take care of her?" Whirl sighed, shrugging, "Then I'm gonna, till she don't need me no more."
Whirl felt strange leaving the Lost Light. It didn't feel like it would be the last time he would see the ship that had been his home for so long- it felt like he would be coming back as soon as leave was over, that they would undock from Cybertron and head out on some new stupid adventure.
Rodimus lingered by Prowl, seeming to be in an inordinately foul mood, but that was probably to be expected. Swerve was running about, trying to get anyone he could to sign some kind of yearbook he had made, but Whirl didn't quite feel up to showing off how terrible his handwriting was, so he continued to strategically avoid him, even as he stepped away from the port center toward the street where others were flagging down cabs or waiting for an opening in traffic.
He paused, watching his two favourite lovebirds chum it up by the runway landing, waiting their turn for takeoff space. Positively sickening, the way they clung to each other. In a good way, though, since they were basically made for each other, the lucky bastards. Whirl stared back out at traffic cabbies waiting for passengers, then glanced back at his own passenger, who had returned to the weird dragon shape she seemed to like so much as she skittered behind him.
"Alright, girly, my plan was to fly home from here," he said, and her optics brightened as she stilled, listening to him, "Can you fly? That a thing you can do? You're a little big to carry, but I can give a go."
She tilted her head first to one side, then the other, making a noise like a warbly trumpet. He wasn't entirely certain what that one meant. After another moment of curious noises and movements, she went amorphous like water, before swelling back up in a new shape- an identical match to him.
"Welp," said Whirl, staring at a mirror image of himself, as she raised her claws in front of her chest and bounced on her heels, making an excited chittering, clearly seeking his approval. "Yeah, I mean, I guess that'll do it, huh?"
"Do it, huh!" she repeated back at him.
"Hey, thatta girl!" He laughed, reaching up to rub the top of her head. She wiggled and chittered happily again, "That's real good stuff. We'll keep working on that, 'Whirl,' heheh."
He took one last look up at Cyclonus and Tailgate as they stepped into the tarmac, hand in hand, before Cyclonus moved forward to transform. Whirl felt his spark ache behind his cockpit, a feeling he was becoming unfortunately acquainted with. He was happy for them, and being happy for other people was still pretty new to him, but he was. They got their happy ending, and if anybody deserved it, it was those dorks.
Tailgate scrambled up into Cyclonus's cockpit and he rolled out to take off, and Whirl sighed. Them heading off to explore the universe together was always the end game. Him finding some new dump to live in on Cybertron was always the way things were gonna end. Scratch that, that was a pretty good ending for him, since he expected to be dead or in prison again by now (though, they weren't done building Garrus-10 on Cybertron yet, weren't done building most things yet, since the attack by Unicron pretty much razed the surface of the planet, so that might have something to do with it) so all things considered, it could be worse.
He was gonna miss them, though. A lot.
"Alright, buckaroo, what do you think of this one?" Whirl asked, tapping on another alt mode hologram, the blue display shimmering and flickering in the unsteady natural light cast on the kid's bedroom floor. Her room was simple, with a tank of oil in the corner to recharge in and a wall full of blueprints she liked, though every inch of the place had been chewed on at some point.
The turbofox rolled over, gnawing on a piece of scrap metal, and eyed the hologram thoughtfully, chittering under her breath.
"Real chunky," she said, finally, "Don't wanna."
"Alright," said Whirl, flicking to the next one, "How 'bout this? It's a motorcycle. Really sleek. Wanna give it a shot, Whirlibird?"
Little Whirl blinked, then scrunched her face up as she inspected the 3D model with visible intrigue. "Maybe!" She said, after a moment, then stood up on all four paws, stretched her front legs out, and morphed her nanites quickly into a new shape to match the hologram.
"Smaller than I expected," the older Whirl commented, sitting up.
"Small is good!" She said, revving her engine experimentally, before she tore off in a circle, doing donuts around the room. "Sleek!"
"Heh," he laughed, because she seemed to be having fun, "Yeah, I'm told it's a fun one. Fast, small, you can do lots of cool stunts and get in lots of tight places my big aft never could."
She came to a stop, transforming into the bike's root mood, sharp and thin, inspecting her arms before looking up at him, "I don't wanna go anywhere you can't go, though."
Whirl felt his spark surge and chuckled, "Aw, shucks, kiddo, you go wherever the put you want. Trust me, if you need me to follow you, not even Optimus Prime could keep me from gettin' to ya."
"Cuz you got guns on your chest?" She asked, crossing her arms behind her back and leaning forward on her pedes playfully.
Whirl laughed, hard, "Yeah, cuz I got guns on my chest, and a bad reputation for ten miles that I earned the pit out of."
"Oh, come off it," Whirl snapped at the mech in front of him, "Don't give me that scrap. I told you point blank she was destructive when I took the room. I didn't keep it no secret from you there was gonna be damage."
"You didn't say your charge was a parasitic horde that would damage the structural integrity of the building !" His (ex) landlord snapped back, "I made the extremely fair assumption you were mentoring a sparkling. "
"She is a sparkling!" Whirl snarled back, sidestepping back in front of her aggressively as she clung to his waist from behind, her fuzzy hands eating shallow divets into the metal. "She ain't no different from your little bastard! I didn't give you no scrap when he broke my window last month!"
"She ate the structural support beam for the building Whirl! The entire complex is unsafe now, it has to be demolished and rebuilt!"
"So what! This is Cybertron, you gotta demolish and rebuild scrap every two weeks!"
"She's dangerous , Whirl, almost as dangerous as you are! I was an idiot not to listen to everyone who warned me not to give you a chance."
"Frag your chance," Whirl hissed, "Frag you and your shitty apartments, too. You think I need you? I don't. There's plenty of apartments on Cybertron, ain't nobody live here. Come on, Whirlygirl." Whirl spun around, ushering the shivering child clinging to him to follow him away from the argument.
"Go on, Whirl, run somewhere else! Go piss off the next person dumb enough to give you a shot! You're gonna run out of charity eventually, and then maybe you'll finally face facts and get rid of that thing before it kills us all!"
Whirl spun around, vents flared, rotors spinning, winglets vibrating with anger as he manually flipped on the safety for his cockpit guns, "I promise you this, I am a hundred times more likely to kill anyone in this room than she is, and that is a threat and a promise." His vocalizer spat static, his optic burned, and his claws buckled at the tips where they were clenched like fists.
He slammed the door behind them hard enough it snapped the hinges, and left upper Petrohex that afternoon.
"I wanna be a helicopter."
Whirl looked up from where he was smelting energon and old pax metallica (which he definitely got legally, don't worry about it) in a pot at the tiny jerski-former sitting on the table.
"Hm?" He asked, blinking at her, "I thought you wanted something sleek and fast."
"No," she said, resolutely, "I wanna be a helicopter."
"Alright," he said, "I'll bring you some more blueprints when I get home from work."
"Cool," she said, kicking her legs back and forth beneath her, "thanks."
He watched her for a moment, before the pot boiled over and he cursed, returning his attention to the task at hand.
"Um, hello?" asked little Whirl, wearing her new alt mode uncomfortably. It was a nice shape, a mix of a few different models she liked, but she had been wearing it for hours and her nanites all itched to release and reform. Every time they rubbed up against each other she felt itchy, burny, distracted, but she really couldn't do that here, and definitely not now. She was used to causing a scene whenever she got fuzzy in public, but usually her father could talk their way out of an uncomfortable situation (or punch, he was pretty good at that, too) but today, she was alone. She'd never been on her own this long, not since she became a one-thing in the first place, and she was terrified of what would happen without him around to vouch for her that she wasn't an unstoppable killing machine. Yet.
"Well hey there, little one," said the mech behind the desk, looking up from his computer terminal and down at her where she stood, "Are you here all alone?"
"I'm here to pick up my dad?" she said, though it came out sounding like a question.
"Your dad?" He repeated, confused.
"Um, my mentor," she corrected, scratching the back of her neck where she was starting to ripple, "The mech on the phone said I could come get him in the morning."
"Have you been alone all night?" He asked, sitting up, face scrunching up in concern, and she nodded, "Oh, no, kiddo, that's no good, that shouldn't happen." He stood from his desk and crouched down in front of her, "Have you had nowhere to stay?"
She shook her head, "He was s'posed to pick me up from school, but he never showed up."
"Oh, no," he sighed, seeming to be genuinely upset, "He must not have you listed as a dependent. That's not supposed to happen. What's your name, kiddo?"
"Whirl," she told him, "My dad's name is the same."
The police officer smiled at her and gave her a sympathetic chuckle, "That's real cute, Whirl. Now, you listen to me, if this ever happens again, you call the police and you tell them what you just told me, okay? That you're an unsupervised dependent, and you need help, okay? Even if your mentor gets in trouble, you didn't do anything wrong, and you don't have to be out alone all night."
"Oh," she said, "Dad told me I shouldn't talk to cops."
The officer bubbled with startled laughter before he rolled his optics, "Your dad is Whirl, right? Big blue helicopter with a bad attitude?"
She nodded. He leaned in close, looking dramatically side to side, as if he were about to tell her a secret, and her optics widened in sudden intrigue.
"Now, don't tell him I told you this, but your mentor? He used to be a cop, before the war."
"He did!" she gasped, clapping her servos over her mouth, "No way!"
"Yes way," the officer chuckled, "He wasn't very good at it, though. So, don't let him tell you cops are the bad guys, he's just being self conscious."
"Whoa," she said, "I'm gonna ask him to tell me all about that!"
"Remember," laughed the officer, putting a finger to his lips, "Do not tell him I told you that, huh?"
"I won't!" She promised, "Um, who are you?"
"Officer Roller," he said, "Now, come on, let's go get your mentor, huh?"