Chapter Text
The scrap haul was, by any reasonable standard, a two-mech job.
This was not Orion's opinion. This was physics. The carts used for waste transport in the lower levels were industrial-grade containers designed for volume, not ergonomics, and when filled to capacity with the accumulated debris of a full extraction shift — rock shards, spent drill bits, broken housing, the general metallic detritus of mining operations — they weighed approximately as much as a small shuttle and needed to be handled with the grace of an angry turbobeast.
Orion and Jazz had been assigned cart seventeen. Cart seventeen was — like most carts numbered in the teens, and by the quiet consensus of the miners who had to deal with it — cursed.
One wheel pulled left, another pulled right, and the steering column had a dead zone in the middle third of its rotation. Not to mention, the loading bay had been filled by the shaft six crew, who apparently believed that "capacity" was a suggestion rather than a structural limit, because the scrap was piled above the rim in a precarious mountain of unidentifiable objects that blocked all forward visibility and swayed with every movement.
"I can't see ANYTHING," Orion grumbled, pushing from behind. His arms were braced against the cart's rear panel, pedes digging into the tunnel floor, his entire frame angled into the effort at approximately thirty degrees. The cart moved. Slowly. With the reluctant, grinding protest of an object that had opinions about being moved and was expressing them.
"I got you, I got you—" Jazz was pulling from the front, walking backward, one servo on the steering column, visor bright as he scanned the tunnel ahead. "Little left. LITTLE left, Pax, there's a—!"
A loud clang of metal hitting metal echoed through the shaft.
"—support beam," Jazz winced.
"I FELT the support beam, Jazz," Orion groaned, clutching the side of his frame the aforementioned support beam had offended.
"My bad, my bad. Okay, straight now, straight, we're good, we're—"
The cart's cursed left wheel chose this moment to lock. The cart lurched. The scrap mountain swayed. Orion's pedes slipped. Jazz's grip on the steering column strained.
"PUSH, Pax—"
"I AM pushing—"
"Push HARDER—"
"I am pushing with my ENTIRE FRAME, Jazz, my frame does not have a harder setting—"
"Just plant your pedes and push, Pax!" Jazz heaved.
The cart grudgingly, hatefully, with maximum passive resistance, began to move again.
Orion's ventilations were running high. His arms were shaking. The scrap pile was blocking everything above his eyeline, so his entire world was the back of a cart and the floor beneath his pedes and the sound of Jazz's encouragement and the deep, fundamental unfairness of waste management shifts.
"How far?" Orion gasped.
"Uh... about... a quarter?"
"Only a QUARTER?!" Orion wanted to offline right then and there.
"It's a long tunnel!"
"We've been pushing for TWENTY CLICKS—"
"And we're like a quarter of the way there! That's progress! That's MEASURABLE PROGRESS—"
This was when D-16 passed them. Not walked. Not strolled. PASSED. Moving at a pace that was casual and unhurried and that put him alongside their cart and then ahead of their cart and then BEYOND their cart in the time it took Orion to process what he was seeing.
D-16 was pulling a cart. The same cart. The same SIZE cart. Filled to the same ridiculous, above-capacity, shaft-six-crew-has-no-concept-of-limits level. The same mountain of scrap, the same industrial-grade container, the same cursed wheel design — coincidentally, and funnily, if Orion hadn't been so tired — cart number sixteen.
D was pulling it alone.
One servo. On the front handle. Walking forward with the measured, easy stride of a mech taking a pleasant stroll through a corridor, his frame upright, his ventilations unlabored, his expression carrying the particular neutrality of someone who was performing a task so far below his physical threshold that it didn't register as effort.
He was pulling it the way Orion would pull out a datapad.
Orion's arms, still braced against cart seventeen, stopped pushing. His processor, which had been dedicated to pushing this Primus-forsaken cart with all his might, staged a full redirect. Every cognitive resource reallocated to the single task of watching D-16's back as he pulled a two-mech cart with one servo.
His back. Which was — it was — the cables in his shoulders were doing a thing. A shifting, flexing, rolling thing that happened beneath his plating as his frame compensated for the load, the kind of subtle, mechanical poetry that most mechs wouldn't notice but that Orion, who had been studying D-16 the way scholars studied ancient texts, noticed with unfortunate, devastating clarity.
The arm on the handle. The servo gripping the bar, relaxed, digits not even fully closed. The slight forward lean of his frame, the way his weight distributed through his legs, the effortless BIOMECHANICS of a mech who was genuinely, fundamentally, structurally built for this.
Something in Orion's tank did a flip.
Not a pleasant flip. Not an oh-how-interesting flip. The flip. The one that had been happening with increasing frequency over the last several cyber-weeks and that Orion had been categorizing as "probably a fuel processing irregularity" because the alternative was unthinkable.
"Pax."
"Mm."
"PAX."
"Mm?"
"You stopped pushing." Jazz frowned.
Orion blinked. Looked down. His arms were, in fact, no longer engaged with the cart. His frame was, in fact, standing upright behind a stationary waste container while his optics tracked his best friend's shoulders down the tunnel.
"I was— I was assessing the route," Orion said, bringing his attention back to the cart in front of him.
Jazz did not buy it for a second.
"You were assessing D's BACK," he accused.
"I was assessing the ROUTE, Jazz. The route that D is ON. With his back. Which happens to be in my field of vision because he's AHEAD of us—"
"Uh-huh."
"It's GEOMETRY, Jazz."
"Sure, Pax. Geometry."
The blue visor was doing the knowing thing. The thing that Jazz's visor did when he was seeing something that other bots missed, which was always, because Jazz was one of the most observant mechs in the lower levels when it came to his friends, and the least likely to keep his observations to himself.
Orion didn't comment further. He pushed the cart again. Harder than before. With the aggressive energy of a mech who was NOT thinking about D's shoulders, or arms, or any part of D's frame — for that matter.
When they had reached the halfway point, D was already there. He had paused, turned, and watched them approach.
D was leaning against his cart — which was parked, neatly, out of the way, because D-16 parked things with the same precision he did everything else. His arms were crossed. Orion could see the faintest undercurrent of amusement visible only to bots who had spent enough time studying his face to read the micro-expressions.
Orion had spent enough time studying his face.
"How—" Orion vented, pushing, the cart groaning beneath him. "How are you— already HERE—"
"It's not that heavy," D-16 said.
"Not heavy my AFT. It IS that heavy—"
"It's really not. You're exaggerating." D shrugged, a small smirk on his dermas.
The smirk that Orion wanted to simultaneously photograph and smack off D's faceplate.
The tank-flip happened again. Stronger this time. Orion shoved it into the category of FUEL IRREGULARITY with increasing desperation.
"Primus," Jazz, still pulling from the front, stared at D-16 with open disbelief. "How strong ARE you? That cart is the same as ours. The same cart. Same load. And you pulled it ALONE. In LESS TIME than two of us—"
D shrugged. The movement was small, economical, and involved his shoulders doing the cable-shift thing again.
Orion looked at the ceiling.
"Tell you what," D-16 offered, and the smirk was growing, inching from barely-there toward actually-visible, which was a threat level that Orion's processor flagged with the same urgency it flagged unstable tunnel ceilings. "If you're both still moving the cart by the time I get back from dropping mine, I'll help."
"Oh." Orion's optics snapped from the ceiling to his bestfriend.
The competitive subroutine — the one that lived next to the recklessness subroutine and the bad-decisions subroutine and the why-am-I-like-this subroutine — fired with an almost audible snap. "Oh, that's a CHALLENGE."
"It's an observation."
"That's a CHALLENGE, Dee. You're challenging us."
"I'm offering help, Pax."
"You're offering help CONDESCENDINGLY. There's a difference," Orion squinted, gripping the bar of the cart tighter with his servos.
"I don't know what you're talking about." The smirk was fully visible now. FULLY. Both corners. With a brightness in his gold optics that Orion had catalogued as "D-16 is having fun but will deny this if asked" and that was doing something to his tank that no amount of fuel irregularity could explain.
"Oh, you're ON," Orion grinned.
"Sure." D gripped his cart handle. One servo. Turned. Began pulling it down the tunnel with the same effortless, infuriating, shoulder-shifting ease as before.
"You're ON, Dee! Jazz, let's GO—"
"I'm already going, Pax, I've BEEN going, you're the one who stopped to assess the GEOMETRY earlier—" Jazz grinned.
"We are NEVER speaking of that—"
"Oh, we will later—"
Orion pushed. Jazz pulled. They HEAVED with the combined desperate energy of two mechs whose pride had been engaged by a third mech who could pull a full waste cart alone and smirk about it.
The cart screamed. The wheel locked and unlocked and locked again. Jazz navigated blind corners through sheer visor-enhanced instinct. Orion pushed until his arms burned and his pedes slipped and his ventilations hit a frequency that concerned him medically.
But eventually, they made it.
The dumping spot opened up before them like a promised land — the wide bay at the tunnel's end where the carts were emptied, the scrap sorted, the whole miserable cycle of waste management brought to its conclusion. Orion and Jazz shoved cart seventeen the final few meters with a combined grunt of effort that echoed off the walls.
They stopped. They vented. Jazz put his servos on his knee joints. Orion relaxed his servos on the cart and then slid downward until he was slumped against the cart and then slid further until he was lying on the ground, face-down, arms spread, in the full-body prostration of a mech who had given everything and had nothing left.
"We did it," Orion said into the floor.
"We did it," Jazz confirmed from somewhere above him, bent double, visor misty.
"How long?"
"Don't ask."
"HOW LONG, Jazz."
"...I think he's been waiting for about five clicks."
Orion looked up. There — leaning against the wall by the dump bay, arms crossed, cart already emptied and parked — was D-16.
Watching them. With the smirk.
"You," Orion said from the floor, "are the WORST."
D-16 chuckled.
It was warm. A low sound that came from his chassis and filled Orion's own spark with warmth, filed and timestamped in the part of his processor that definitely didn't exist, buried under the loads and loads of folders he kept on a regular basis.
"I was going to help," D said, pushing off the wall. "But watching you both try to kill yourselves with a cart was too good."
"We DIDN'T try to kill ourselves—" Orion scoffed.
"Pax, you're lying on the floor."
"The floor is COMFORTABLE. I'm CHOOSING to be here."
"You're choosing to be face-down in mining residue."
"It's a LIFESTYLE, Dee."
D-16 looked down at him. The angle — D-16 standing, Orion on the floor — put his bestfriend's face directly above him, backlit by the tunnel's overhead lights, and for a moment Orion's processor went completely offline because D from this angle was—
Fuel irregularity. FUEL IRREGULARITY.
D-16 reached down.
One servo. Extended. Palm open. The same gesture he'd made a hundred times — after stumbles, after falls, after every gravity-related incident that Orion's spatial awareness had failed to prevent. The casual, automatic, zero-hesitation offer of a servo up.
Orion Pax took it.
D-16 pulled.
The pull was — it was nothing to D. Orion could feel that in the mechanics of it. D's servo closed around his servo, the arm engaged, and Orion went from horizontal to vertical in a single smooth motion that felt less like being helped up and more like being relocated by a force of nature. No strain. No effort. No adjustment. Just grip, pull, stand. Done.
Orion was on his pedes. D's servo was still in his. The contact point was warm.
"Thanks," Orion said. His voice was doing something he hadn't authorized. He chose to ignore that fact altogether.
D released his servo. Turned to Jazz. Extended the same servo.
"Jazz. Up."
"Bless you, D-16. You're a saint. A terrifying, cart-pulling saint." D pulled Jazz up with the same effortless one-armed motion. Jazz staggered slightly on his pedes, visor recalibrating, and clapped D-16 on the shoulder.
"Seriously, mech. How do you DO that? We're all the same frame class. We're all cogless. There's no reason you should be able to pull that cart solo—"
"I just pull harder," D said.
Orion, as absurdly simple as that explanation was, was inclined to agree.
"That's NOT an explanation—" Jazz replied, servos in the air.
D shrugged. The shoulder thing. The cables.
Orion looked at the wall.
"Thanks, D," Jazz said, grinning. "For the help. And the show."
"Wasn't a show." But the smirk was there. Small. Warm. The version that was closer to an actual smile than D-16 usually allowed in public, and that Orion's processor flagged and timestamped again with a specificity that was becoming concerning.
D turned to Orion. The smirk shifted into something more direct. Pointed. The expression he wore when he was about to say something that was half reprimand and half affection and entirely D-16.
"Still got more to do," he said. "And you—" A finger, extended, pointed at Orion's chassis. "—don't run off again. Last time you 'took a break' I found you three shafts over trying to climb a ventilation stack."
"That was a RESEARCH EXPEDITION—"
"That was a DEATH WISH. Stay with the carts, Pax."
"I always stay with the carts—"
"You have NEVER stayed with the carts. In the entire time I've known you, you have not once remained where you were supposed to be for the duration of a shift."
"That's... not technically..."
"Name ONE time."
Orion opened his intake. Searched his memory banks. Found nothing.
"It's a work in progress, which I am currently working on with this cart HERE that Jazz and I just delivered—"
"Then make sure to 'work' on it with the next cart as well," D huffed, a small smile betraying his dermas.
D turned and walked back toward the shaft, and Orion watched him go, his servo still warm, and his tank was still flipping, and the words FUEL IRREGULARITY were starting to look very, very inadequate as an explanation.
Jazz appeared beside him. Visor shining. Expression entirely too knowing.
"Geometry, huh," Jazz said.
"Shut up, Jazz."
"The geometry of his BACK—"
"I said SHUT UP—"
"His SHOULDERS, Pax. You were looking at his SHOULDERS—"
"I was looking at the TUNNEL—"
"There is no tunnel behind D-16's shoulders—"
"THERE IS A TUNNEL EVERYWHERE, Jazz, we are IN a tunnel, everything is tunnel—"
"You've got it BAD."
"I have a fuel processing irregularity."
"You have a CRUSH."
"I have a FUEL PROCESSING IRREGULARITY and it is a MEDICAL CONDITION and I will be speaking to RATCHET about it—"
"Please DO speak to Ratchet about it. I would pay actual credits to hear you describe your 'fuel irregularity' to Ratchet while he stares at you."
Orion grabbed the now-empty cart — his cart, not D's, he wasn't touching D's solo cart and the implications thereof — and began pushing it back toward the shaft with the aggressive energy of a mech who was not thinking about shoulders or servo grips or the sound of a chuckle he heard if he was lucky.
Jazz followed. Grinning. Wise enough not to push further. Unwise enough to start humming what sounded suspiciously like a love ballad under his ventilations.
"I can HEAR you, Jazz."
"Hear what? I'm humming. It's a work song. Very common in the mines."
"That's not a work song."
"It's a work song about the GEOMETRY of FEELINGS—"
"I am going to push this cart INTO you—"
Jazz cackled and jogged ahead, and Orion pushed the cart alone, and his arms ached and his pedes were tired and his tank was doing the thing, and somewhere ahead of him, down the shaft, D was pulling another full cart with one servo like it was nothing because to him it WAS nothing, and Orion, amidst the beat of his spark and the flutter in his tank, wondered how strong his bestfriend really was.
A few more tests would have to be conducted.
Even if it meant a quieter, inner part of himself was getting harder and harder to keep locked down.