Work Text:
Whirl snagged the medical tools a long, long time ago - by which he means, in that tiny window of time when First Aid was too busy crying about Ambulon to notice when some of Ambulon's scalpels vanished into Whirl's subspace. He doesn't have a lot of subspace left, really, not since getting booted from the Wreckers, (he sold off the bulkier armor to Swindle when he was in a dark place in his life - what can he say? - in exchange for explosives, and no one has been inclined to bulk him back up again since they left Cybertron), but his slimmed down, basic frame has always had room for little things like this. And hey! It's not like Ambulon is around to miss this stuff, anymore. Might as well put it to use!
But the scalpel collection isn't quite enough for what Whirl's trying to do, and it's not like Whirl can easily obtain smaller tools while the Lost Light's busy bouncing around the galaxy like a pinball machine fueled by quantum nonsense and extravagant quantities of engex. Most of the organic planets they land on have tools that are too fragile and bendy for Whirl to pinch with his snip-snaps. His nipper-noppers. His chela-belas.
(Haha, claw jokes. A timeless classic.)
Brainstorm, though. Brainstorm gets up to some fun stuff in his lab, and Whirl's always up for fun gun times. Moreover, Whirl being up for fun gun times is a well-known fact on board the ship, so no one ever questions it when he hums on his way to Brainstorm's place. Whirl only has to ask if he can borrow a micro-screwdriver, and Brainstorm, engrossed in his latest and greatest attempt to attract Perceptor's attention and/or blow up a sun, will toss it to Whirl with a flap of his hand. It's not like he'll miss them; Brainstorm blows his lab up so regularly that it's probably a standing order under the Lost Light's miscellaneous repairs budget. Whirl got a look at that thing once, while waiting on a very stern, very pointedly ignored lecture from Ultra Magnus, and the miscellaneous repairs section of their budget is hilarious.
Even once Whirl gathers what he needs, though, he doesn't make the first attempt for...a long time. He bundles the scalpels and borrowed tools up in his subspace for months and months, feeling them bounce and clack around his insides at irregular intervals, and Whirl tells himself it's because he's got too much going on in his life. Places to shoot, people to go, Decepticons to see - he can never say life on the Lost Light is boring, that's for fragging sure.
Except when it is. When they're drifting toward the next stop on Rodimus's Wild Ride and Whirl's left prowling his habsuite and pacing the corridors and lurking at Swerve's in a compulsive loop, checking in repeatedly just to make sure there really isn't something new to do: no new notifications on the crew 'net, no interesting gossip, no one to needle into a funny reaction, nothing to distract him from -
It's when Whirl catches himself willingly considering the possibility of filling out his incredibly extensive backlog of paperwork assigned by Mags that he realizes his procrastination has reached unacceptable levels. In fact, avoidance can get fragged - Whirl would rather die than initial a single one of the thousands of forms that have accumulated in his inbox since they left Cybertron. The big U.M. will have to live in disappointment for another hundred thousand years; Whirl's neglect of paperwork is the stuff of legends, thank you very much, and he's not slacking off on his long-standing policy of not caring now. They'll pry his 'avoiding paperwork' galactic record from his cold, dead pincers.
So Whirl triple checks the locks on his habsuite, retrieves all the parts he's not technically supposed to have in his possession (something about homemade explosives being a no-no and Whirl not being trusted to not blow them all into the next dimension), and sets it all up at the counter opposite his berth. He dumps his subspace out with a careless shake, letting the scalpels and screwdrivers fall where they may.
He stares at the counter for approximately two kliks before nausea rolls up in his tanks like a wave, and he has to bolt for the washracks to go through the arduous ritual needed to let him purge his tanks without medical assistance. He glares down anyone who makes the mistake of peering in at him, bristling his armor and closing one snipper on the stall door in quick pinches so that the metal starts to dent and deform under his grip. His vocalizer won't activate when he's got his internal channel uncapped, which means he can't ask them if they're all enjoying the show, but if one of the crew's dumb enough to wander into the pinch zone when Whirl's in a mood like this, he takes zero responsibility for his actions.
Anyway. First attempt - a rousing success, in Whirl's opinion! He's learned a valuable life lesson, which is that he shouldn't ever try again. When he creeps back into his habsuite later that night, wobbling a little under Trailcutter levels of engex, he does his best to clear his desk off so he won't have to avoid that side of the room for the rest of his existence/however long they let him stay before shipping him off to prison again. I mean, it's not like he uses the desk for anything except as a convenient place to toss data pads before he finds the time to space them out the airlock, but. Still.
But the scalpels defy him. Fiddly little fraggers - Whirl spends nearly half a cycle with his optic narrowed to a thin line to maximize its limited focus, frustration mounting as the blunt ends of his claws fail to scoop the thin metal blades off the flat surface. He almost manages to pinch one up off the desk by using both snippers, but just winds up gouging a long scratch on the desk while the scalpel skitters away. By the time his overcharged processor thinks to just scrape them off the edge of the desk and onto his forearm, he's started twitching with irritation on top of the wobbliness, and his useless fragging piece of slag [not hands] decide to send the scalpels clattering across the floor.
Whirl has to wrench the desk apart from the wall with a painful squeal of metal in order to flip it properly, but it's worth it. He rates it at least a 6 out of 10 on the Prowl scale, which isn't half bad considering how high Prowl sets the bar for tossing furniture around with wild abandon, and considering how overcharged Whirl is. He doesn't know what sets him off worse: the fact that Ambulon apparently cursed his scalpels to give anyone who lays claw on them butterfingers, or the fact that he slipped up and called his snip-snaps what they really are for the first time in -
Doesn't matter. Brainstorm's tools wind up scattered to the corners of the room, and Whirl runs out of steam after he bends the table in two over his knee and tosses it to the side, his engex-addled vestibular system betraying him and sending him staggering back. A micro-scalpel snaps with a teeny clnk when Whirl's heavy pede comes down on it; he leaves the rest of them where they lay and splays himself out on the berth instead, a truly foul mood percolating in his processor. He clicks his right pincer once, observing the sharp, jolting motion as it snaps shut, and then forces it down out of sight.
It was a stupid idea. Whatever. He'll finish smashing the rest of his stolen tools in the morning, and that'll be that.
-
What was that about Whirl learning valuable life lessons? Haha, hilarious! Whirl hasn't learned a slagging thing in his entire life; he knows this from personal experience.
In the morning, he skips whatever the frag he was signed up for on the ship's haphazard duty roster (it was going to bore him to tears anyway, he's sure) and snags a small magnet from one of the recreation rooms. Once he turns it on, he uses it to collect all the scattered tools and gears and circuit boards from the floor, and returns them to the now-standalone, warped desk he's propped up against the wall. Whirl mutters to himself as he shoves a chair back over to the desk and throws himself onto the seat with a resounding clang. It's not like he needs to worry about waking the mechs in the neighboring habsuites. By which he means, he doesn't care enough to worry about bothering them; if they're not used to Whirl's periodic bursts of violence and noise at all hours of the day by now, Whirl can't help them. He doesn't have the innate caring power needed to concern himself with anything except getting this over with. No, he refuses to let a little thing like deep, unprocessed, millennia-old trauma stand between him and reclaiming this half of the habsuite.
He doesn't make a watch. No, no, he doesn't hate himself quite that much! It's...this is hard enough to force himself through, already, and Whirl would probably just end up punching a hole through the ship's bulkheads until he reaches vacuum. There used to be a time when he could etch his own clock hands, and arrange lights into glyphs, and braid thin links of soft gold with easy servos, and fit nanoscopic chips of ruby into pivot points, and, and, and and and -
Ha. He can't do that anymore. His hands were forged for watchmaking, and they're - long gone. Even if Whirl could bear the thought of replacing them, whatever generic brand replacement servos Ratchet might waste time scrounging up for someone like Whirl would never have the same level of fine control again. When he first started tinkering, all those years ago, Whirl hadn't even needed to practice or try to look up schematics; his fingers knew just what to do. He's not ever going to get that back, never ever, and pretending he can learn a different method like this is so fragging stupid. Whirl vents so hard that his frame starts to shudder and rattle with it, until he curls up tight enough to crunch the edges of his armor plates and forces himself to stop.
He doesn't make a watch, no, yet he can't even call what results from the first attempt a clock. A [mistake], yeah, with all the old Functionist connotations that implies, Whirl thinks, turning the ugly box over in his claws. But not a clock. The glyph display won't fit into the blocky frame no matter how much pressure Whirl dares to apply, so it swings slowly on the end of the wires that connect it to the internal workings. Worse still, the time readout on the display is approximately two microseconds off from the internal chronometer reading that he referenced, which means that clock drift is inevitable. Unacceptable. Pinching the scalpels and screwdrivers tight between his pincers only allows Whirl to make a mockery of the kind of fine motor control servos would provide; the vast discrepancy between what his processor's motor control programming expects his absent servos to be capable of and what his simple, crude claws can actually do with their limited range of articulation means that Whirl's entire arm uncontrollably jumps to compensate when he's supposed to be making minute, nanoscopic level adjustments to try to fix it.
The claws work pretty good when it comes to pulling a trigger, or to smashing a useless, [useless] box of scrap metal and rubbish parts against the wall, and that's what counts, right? Right. When Whirl's finished flattening the hunk of junk into a rectangular dent in the wall, he brings both claws down on the desk with all his weight, so that it bends along the fault lines from the night before and caves in on itself, all the tools scattering. One screwdriver narrowly misses impaling Whirl's optic socket and flies up to embed itself in the underside of a cabinet.
Screw this. He'd rather punch someone who can punch back.
-
Whirl doesn't know why he tries again the next night. Or the night after that. Or the night after that, like clockwork. He doesn't get any better; he's not sure it's possible for him to improve, not with what he's got to work with, here. An optic with artificial depth perception and military-grade targeting programs to make up for its generally [obsolete] - in human terms, [shitty] - quality; a pair of bulky claws that can only pivot to a certain degree, depending on how well the medics feel like fixing them after the latest fight; a random assortment of pilfered tools he's mooching off a dead 'bot and a barely-friend, none of them the specialized loupes or winders or tweezers Whirl ordered or designed to his own specifications before everything became awful. Most of the time, Whirl ends the night by using the rectangular clock frames and their misshapen innards for target practice. Which gets him written up by good old Ummmm for Great Justice, but honestly, who cares what a mech shoots in the privacy of his own room?
The thing is, they start to pile up. Whirl keeps the first one that manages to sync with his chronometer by sheer chance - it's just as plain and functional and unappealing to look at as the first forty attempts, but Whirl sets it with a careful clack in the furthest corner of his battered desk, tapping the clock with a careful claw until it lines up with the wall, and then spends the rest of the night forgetting to recharge, too fascinated by the glowing yellow glyphs counting off the seconds from across the room. It almost drives him up a wall, actually, because paranoia has him convinced that the second he turns off his optic to recharge, the clock will go off beat. The thought follows him when he leaves the room and haunts him in recharge feedback the next night, and finally Whirl has to turn the clock display to face the wall so that he won't stare at it through the off shift. Schrödinger's clock - if Whirl never looks, the clock could be on time or off. Perfect! A flawless plan to avoid giving himself some new neurosis for Rung to pick at him about.
As if he has the self-control for that. He flips the clock back around within a cycle, and frets over it until he completes the next viable clock a week later. This one's glyphs flicker at irregular intervals, which Whirl knows must mean there's a loose wire somewhere inside, but he doesn't dare take it apart again to check, not when it keeps perfect time as is. The one after that has a significant dent in the shape of the blunt end of his claw - he has no idea how that happened, why do you ask? - in the side, but he makes a pyramid out of the three clocks, so no one can see it.
He starts to get the knack of making them. If he sticks the smallest scalpel between the thinnest gears, Whirl can push down on the scalpel like a lever instead of struggling to wiggle his claw between the gears again. Holding the cesium chamber closer to his optic doesn't actually make it easier to calibrate, but borrowing one of Brainstorm's magnifying lenses (most likely stolen from Perceptor in the first place) brings things into better focus, though he loathes admitting defeat that way. If he slots together most of the internal clockwork before mounting it in the clock frame, it's easier to make small fixes than if he tries to do it through the clock face. Whirl keeps the magnet looped around his wrist so that if he drops anything or loses his grip on a round screwdriver, he just has to flick it on and swish it around impatiently near ground level until the tool reappears. Soon he stops keeping careful count of how many clocks are stacked up in the pile on his desk; they all tell the same time with the same accuracy, all with the same rectangular box shape and the same numeral glyphs and the same basic internal structure. It should get boring or frustrating after a while, but monotony never quite sets in. Frustration, oh, yeah - Whirl smashes another failed attempt every third night or so, whenever his claws develop an inexplicable tremor, or when his optic fritzes and goes suddenly blurry when he's trying to concentrate, for frag's sake, or when he manages to snap a scalpel in his haste to pick it up and has to waste two days trying to wheedle a replacement out of medical storage without Ratchet hauling him in for maintenance.
But it's never boring. Clocks can never be boring. He could make a thousand of these useless, cut-rate digital clocks, and it would still hold his interest, without fail. Even if Whirl doesn't know what his end goal is - what, does he expect to collect these things forever? Bury his habsuite in a tidal wave of identical timepieces? Stack them up and use them as a secondary berth, for when he feels like kicking his legs out and stretching properly? Recreate one of those Earth movies where the nominal protagonists steal massive piles of physical currency from their bank system, or that scene from the drugs show where they faceplant in stacks of money? Ha - start handing them out to mechs unfortunate enough to pass him in the hallway? As if anyone would want one. He dumped one in Ultra Magnus's office already, just for fun, but he's sure that the next time he gets hauled in for an arrest/lecture it'll be gone. Even if they weren't shoddy knockoffs of what he used to be able to create, Whirl's well and truly aware of just how useless these things are. Superfluous, when everyone's got their own built in chronometers. At best, his watches were only ever decorative; these things are just sad and [u s e l e s s]. Plus, there's like, an eighty percent chance that Whirl swiped one of Brainstorm's special screwdrivers by accident, and now half of these clocks are literal ticking time bombs. No one's gonna want one of these in their room without a blast shield between it and the berth, if they know what's good for them.
Whirl finishes another clock in under ten kliks, turning it over and inserting the circuit board with practiced ease, and tosses it on top of the stack. It lands topside-down, nudging one of the buttons on the top so that the glyph display starts flashing, waiting for him to input an alarm time. Whirl rights the clock with a flick of his claw and taps the button until it shows the time again. A wall of 19:23 illuminates that half of the room when he falls into recharge at night, contentment pooling in his chest like warm energon.
-
He sets as many of them as he can reach to 1:13, perfectly nonchalant. Turning his back to Getaway is probably a mistake, but Whirl's already put his foot in it, and he doesn't honestly expect to walk away from this conversation in one piece.
Then, once the gun goes off, he realizes he's being stupid; these aren't his old watches, they're all digital. And he transmits the remote code to set the rest while Getaway and Atomizer slink out of the room, oblivious to Whirl's efforts. Clocks aren't useful, after all. They dismissed Whirl's mess as irrelevant the moment they walked in the door, and never gave the clocks a second glance.
A quarter of the way around the ship, his holomatter avatar sinks through Brainstorm's lab in a determined, blurred daze - he can hardly remember what size the human projection is supposed to be - but that's not where she's supposed to go - she sinks her spindly human hands into one of the ship's massive seams and pushes off, drifting toward the nearest window -
-
Apparently Whirl did...something. Getting the full story involves a metric load of slag: making Cyclonus talk is like pulling dentae at the best of times, let alone when he's fresh out of the medibay and acting as though the permanent, Tetrahex-issued stick shoved up his aft has doubled in size in the space of a night. (Seriously - Whirl would lay his entire life's savings on Tetrahexans being quite literally built with an iron rod where their spinal strut should be; every single one he's ever known just cannot let anything go). And even once Tailgate's up and about and acting like a teeny tiny Hercules with his teeny tiny arms and completely disproportionate strength, Cyclonus still won't spit it out. Oh no. The weird, gruff respect just gets worse, if that's possible. Cyclonus is acting - dare Whirl say it - like they had some kind of honest to Primus moment, and now Whirl can't even remember what happened! What if he got something worth blackmailing Cyclonus with? Maddening.
(And all of Whirl's clocks have been stopped at the wrong time. It gives him a spark attack when he looks up and notices that the time on the clocks does not match the time in his head. It's not right, it's not real, someone - someone's messing with his head or his clocks, one or the other, and the lurch of raw panic in his spark sends Whirl scrambling to tear the nearest clock apart, trying to figure out what's wrong, because he knows how to fix a clock better than he knows how to fix his own processor if he tries to rip out his chronometer -)
After a few weeks of weirdness, Whirl's forced to take action. And by action, he means sneaking up on Cyclonus when he's busy brooding at Swerve's, hooking an arm around the mech's neck, and slinging himself across his lap until Cyclonus is finally embarrassed enough to throw Whirl over the bar. Which seems like good progress, but now that Whirl's noticed the difference in Cyclonus's attitude, it's hard to stop noticing it. The weirdness gets more subtle, but Whirl still catches Cyclonus at it. After enough cajoling and casual harassment, Cyclonus finally explains that he came to Whirl for some kind of harsh, unvarnished, mech-to-mech talk sesh - about relationship problems, of all things! - and that this seems to have led to Whirl applying his conscience for the first time in forever (shudder), Whirl can't do much except sit there and stare. He has a very intimidating, unsettling stare, he's been told, but Cyclonus's stoic frown meets Whirl's optic and wins. All that staring out of windows must be excellent practice for scrap like this. "...Right, then. That's weird. Super weird. Thanks for making it extra super weird," Whirl says, at last, and then he stalks out to go surrender himself to Ultra Magnus for brig time. Bad enough that Cyclonus is acting weird - Whirl somehow isn't scheduled for brig time, which is frankly unrealistic, and he has to sneak into the cells instead of out of them for once in his life to go kick Getaway in the shins. What shins the guy has left, anyway.
Relationship problems! And Whirl doesn't have any actual memory of this prime gossip material?! Cyclonus obviously omitted a bunch of choice, embarrassing quotes, and now Whirl will never know. Unacceptable.
He sits down at his desk the next night, all his clocks back on time, and stares at the parts for the next one. If he can't get his kicks from laughing at Cyclonus having capital e Emotions, then at least he can make a clock. It's almost as good - he looks forward to working on clocks almost as much as he looks forward to fighting people, these days.
He's hesitant to call it happiness. But if it isn't happiness, it's the next best thing. No one told him or forced him to do this, by circumstance or by orders - this is just something he wants to do. The only thing motivating him is his own desire.
He'd forgotten what that felt like.
A pair of tiny human feet stop next to the second-largest screwdriver. It's almost as long as she is tall. His holomatter avatar cocks her head at Whirl, tapping her foot with her arms folded over her chest. He doesn't remember redesigning her to look older, or when she finished braiding her ponytails - but like frag does he understand the mechanics behind these things, at the best of times. She waggles her fingers at him and raises one spiky eyebrow, and for a klik, Whirl contemplates how bad it'll look if he kicks his own avatar out of the airlock. She's not even technically separate from him - any and all sass she gives him comes directly from some traitorous part of Whirl's own processor.
"If you get squashed, you get to explain the psychological implications of all this nonsense to Rung. Not me," Whirl informs her. His avatar rolls her eyes and then starts hiking up the legs of her overall shorts.
Having a pair of tiny, squishy hands in the mix doesn't help much. Directing a projection of a human body doesn't feel the same as it would if Whirl had his old fingers back; there's always going to be ten degrees of difference between how muscles and metal work. Even if he sized up the scale of the projection, she wouldn't be able to mimic the dexterity he needs.
But the avatar can crawl right into the clock frame to fix all those minor issues that Whirl sometimes can't reach; she winds up her braids into Princess Leia buns on either side of her head and wedges herself between the gears to kick wire connections more firmly into place, then crawls back out onto Whirl's waiting claw so they can check to see if it worked. For a while it takes a little longer to finish each clock, despite the fact that Whirl has this pattern so well memorized that he could build the clock in recharge - with his avatar assisting, he can afford to be a liiittle pickier with the overall finished product, and the two of them muse over each part with an eye apiece.
He's not sure he dares change the pattern. If he tries something more complex, more specialized, Whirl's not sure if he'll be able to bear the inevitable frustration (and disappointment) of his claws reaching their limit. He has a better feel for how to balance the tools in between his pincers, what angle he needs to hold the scalpels at for maximum range of motion. But still. His [not hands] aren't going away any time soon. If he changes and builds something other than boxy alarm clocks, it's only a matter of time before he plateaus out, and then where will he be?
But he needs to do - something different. He's not sure what. Something other than these alarm clocks, because at the very least he's going to run out of desk space soon. As hilarious as a table or berth extension built solely out of clockwork would be, Whirl's not about to ruin all his hard won clocks by trying to weld these babies together into furniture.
A watch. He wants to make a watch. His avatar is wearing a Swatch covered in little cartoon robots, and she winks a golden eye as she shoots a pair of finger pistols at him when she catches him staring. The little fragger.
-
There was a time when Whirl could build a watch into his own arm with little more than a handful of secondhand tools and determination. He has absolutely zero desire to try that again - to this day, he's not sure how he managed it without giving himself a rust infection. If finding spare parts to hammer into shape for his clocks was hard enough with the Lost Light's unpredictable route, finding the smaller bits and rounded frame for a watch is even harder. Brainstorm's under stricter supervision and budget constraints since his magnificent 'murder the buckethead in his metaphorical robot baby crib' plan fell through, so Whirl has to be sneakier than ever when he goes to raid the lab on the sly.
"Brought you a present," Whirl announces, helping the door open by kneeing it in the access panel.
Brainstorm looks up, scans the clock that Whirl tosses on the lab table with an assessing optic, and visibly dismisses it as a non-explody device before bending back over his work. "Yeah? Help yourself," he says, angling a wing toward the far table. Clacking his claws together in anticipation, Whirl pretends to shuffle through the sadly diminished pile of handheld weapons of mass destruction Brainstorm has finished and mounted on the wall, and walks out of the room with gun that latches onto his forearm with a brace. Very Megatron-chic. As much as it pains him to desecrate a nice gun, Whirl has it stripped down to the brace almost before he's finished sprinting back to his room, and rolls the now unbalanced gun under his desk in case of emergencies that call for a boomstick.
Helpfully, his holomatter avatar starts jumping up and down on the brace to try to bend the ends closer together. Since she weighs next to nothing, this is remarkably ineffective. Whirl picks her up by the shirt with the very tips of his claws and dumps her on the floor beside the gun, which dwarfs her until the projection sizes itself up, crawls out from under the desk, and leans over Whirl's shoulder to contemplate the brace. [Could slice off a ring from the gun barrel for a frame], she says, as they both tap their chins.
"Hmm. A watch made out of a gun. I'm such a genius." Whirl preens.
His avatar rolls her eye. [Betcha if we ask nice, Brainstorm will make it shoot things again after it's done].
A gun watch. A watch gun. Brilliant. Whirl has never had a better idea in his entire life. There's simply no contest. If he can build it he'll probably never take it off. It doesn't matter how tempting it might be to punch Megatron in the chest - as soon as that watch is on Whirl's wrist, he's going to be guarding it with his life. He doesn't have time to feel nervous or some other wimpy scrap like that as he gets to work - a future in which he can gleefully shout 'time's up!' as he shoots a Decepticon in the face with his incredible, amazing, peerless gun watch is at stake, here, and Whirl is going to make this watch if it kills him.
-
It's weird. When he next visits Brainstorm's lab, the clock is still there, in one piece. Whirl figured the thing would have been disassembled and used to make more explosive things in that grand circle of gun-clock-gun life that he has just discovered, but who knows the mind of Brainstorm? He probably just forgot it was sitting in the corner of his work table.
-
"Heyyy? Anyone home? Whirrrl, are you in there?"
Whirl hasn't left this room in four days. He was fully prepared to slowly turn around in his chair and greet Ultra Magnus in good Bond villain style when the big guy inevitably arrived to reprimand Whirl for not checking in under the terms of his indefinite parole, but the voice outside his door sounds too high pitched, and Whirl doesn't actually want to be interrupted by anyone right now. Maybe if he pretends to be absent and/or dead, they'll go away. He's busy feeling miserable and sorry for himself, thanks. Hunching further over the desk, Whirl lays his optic socket alongside the circle of titanium backing and glowers at the watch pieces scattered on top of it. All it took this time was for him to put too much pressure on the topmost balance wheel, and the carefully layered wheels and pinions collapsed on top of his avatar. She's lying under a tension spring now, one hand thrown dramatically over her face as she stares at the ceiling in mirrored despair. [Leave me alone, I'm busy suffering], she mumbles. Whirl bangs his helm on the table in frustrated agreement.
"Hellooo? Is anyon- oh no!"
Tailgate must have tried to knock on the door. In Tailgate's case, though, knocking on the door means punching the door out of its frame to smash against the opposite wall. Whirl freezes, his armor plating on edge, and his holo avatar pops out of existence as his focus shatters. When he inches around to stare at Tailgate, outlined in the door, he sees that the mech has clapped his hands to his helm, his visor bright with mortification.
Once the instinctive urge to start shooting at a sudden intruder passes, Whirl sits up straight and waves a claw, the picture of casual not giving a frag. "Welcome to my humble abode," he says, laying his rotor fans down in front of the pile of parts that refuse to form a watch.
Tailgate's visor flares, and he takes a ginger step over the threshold. "Uh, yeah. Sorry about that," he says, with a nervous laugh. Whirl would normally question the sanity of anyone who wanders into his room without a big gun or some other insurance, but considering Tailgate could probably bench-press him and Cyclonus at the same time these days...yeah.
"Eh, it was a cheap door, anyway. Do you know how many of them I go through in a week? Maintenance gives me the flimsy scrap for a reason." Whirl starts spinning his chair around in slow circles, his optic fixed on Tailgate with each pass until he needs to wrench his neck around for the next turn. Tailgate's visor follows him; he already looks kind of nauseated. Whirl clicks his claws together and ignores the vague sense of déjà vu washing over him. "And what brings you to my door? I know, I know, I'm such a stellar host - but really. If you're looking for dirt on Cyclonus, I'm afraid my vocalizer's sealed without the proper incentive. My relationship advice is in hot demand, these days, and I intend to capitalize on it."
Tailgate starts stammering instantly, his optics spitting sparks of alarm as he babbles. Pffft, talk about transparent. "What? No, no, it's nothing like that! I mean -" He breaks off, clapping his hands against his maskplate and shaking his head vigorously. When he starts talking again, his voice sounds hesitant. "Look, I'm still not really sure what all happened that day, but Cyclonus - he said that you gave him a warning, when I was in trouble. So...thanks, I guess?"
Eurgh, no. This had better not turn into another Chromedome hug incident. That's the nice thing about being not-enemies with Cyclonus: that mech only hugs you in a vaguely threatening matter when he means it to be threatening. Other people might make it weird, but not Cyclonus. Not a hint of awkward emotional outbursts or gratitude out of that guy, no sir. When Tailgate starts trotting toward Whirl, Whirl spins his chair at top speed to ward off any chance of well-intentioned marshmallow hugs. Knowing Tailgate, a hug could crush Whirl's entire cockpit. Not today, please. "Yeah, whatever. You know me - the resident Good Samaritan and matchmaker," Whirl calls over his shoulder as he continues to spin and be an excellent host at the same time. "Solicitations for my services are numerous in quantity. Compensation...non-existent, but I'm working on it."
When he completes another circuit, Tailgate has arrived at the desk. Whirl skids to a stop by letting a pede drag along the floor, while Tailgate peeks curiously at Whirl's wares. "Whirl?"
Whirl plants his arm back down in front of the watch parts, shielding them from view. Not much he can do to hide the enormous stacks of clocks that line the wall, though - he can see Tailgate's optics focus on them through his visor. "Short stuff?" he says, evenly.
"...Never mind." Tailgate boosts himself up with a hand on the edge of the desk, bending it a little as he peers over Whirl's defensive arm at the mechanical parts. Whirl bristles, but resists the urge to snap and elbow the mech away. "Are you working on something? Those are all clocks, right?"
There's something weird about the way Tailgate says that: like he's already familiar with what a clock is. Surprisingly few mecha are, unless they've been exposed to Earth and other organic cultures that still make external timepieces. Whirl always knew he was practicing a dying art, even before the war; chronometers beat clocks and watches long before Whirl was forged. "What does this look like, show and tell?" he snaps, his agitation flaring as Tailgate continues to hover in the pinch zone to try to sneak a peek at his not-watch. Whirl spies Tailgate's hand creeping up as though to inflict massive damage upon Whirl's incredibly delicate watch parts, and Whirl gives up any pretense of hospitality in favor of curling over his watch and emitting a binary hiss. "No touching," he says, snapping a pincer.
Tailgate yanks his hand back and stumbles back from the desk. "Sorry!" Unfortunately, in addition to Tailgate not knowing when to quit, the mech's recently become Superman, so putting the fear of Whirl in him only lasts for a klik before Tailgate rallies and starts inspecting Whirl's clocks, instead. "Why have you made so many of them?" he asks, kicking one leg absently as he points at one of the older alarm clocks, at the bottom of its stack.
With a vent, Whirl rests his helm on top of his arm, staring into the middle distance. That is an excellent question. "Because I've lost control of my life," he says, at last. Yeah, that sounds about right.
"Huh." Tailgate shoots him a furtive look. Since this is Tailgate, that's a very liberal interpretation of 'furtive' - Whirl has more subtlety in his left claw hinge than Tailgate has in his entire tiny body. "Do you, uh. Do you make them for yourself, like a collection? Or can anyone have one?"
Whirl narrows his optic into a line, suspicious and immediately on the defensive. He swings around in his chair a little. Just enough to peer down at Tailgate. If he leans in optic socket first and leers, it tends to unsettle people enough that they'll do or say anything to have an excuse to back off. "Not sure why anyone would want one," he says, forcing a mocking singsong into his voice. "Chronometers make them non-essential." He can't make his vocalizer say [useless] - hasn't been able to say it aloud in years and years, except in the privacy of his own processor - but that was the one concept Functionists allowed a million different synonyms for, so Whirl has plenty of options to choose from.
"Mine was broken, before."
Whirl resets his optic. Tailgate says it so sudden and fast that Whirl thinks he's misheard. "Your what now?"
Now Tailgate's tapping his forefingers together, bouncing back and forth from his heels to his toes, his visor fixed on his hands. He clears his vocalizer and says, "My chronometer. It was kind of super annoying, and I missed the entire war because of it. My internal readouts just kept saying weird stuff, and I couldn't figure out what was going on half the time." He pauses, ducking his head shyly, and mumbles at his hands. "So. I...Could I maybe borrow one? It seems pretty useful!"
Before, Whirl would have thought nothing in the world could make him stop and re-evaluate his entire life.
Haha. Turns out saying that a clock could be pretty useful means that he will now literally die for this mech. Whoops! Talk about awkward. Tailgate just has to ask. It's that easy.
Whirl wants to cry.
"You want one?" he says. He needs to be sure. Part of Whirl wants to demand Tailgate repeat that last sentence a hundred times so he can memorize how it sounds ('it seems pretty useful' - more like finally please thank you) but his vocalizer can barely croak out that much. Tailgate looks uncertain, thrown off by the renewed intensity of Whirl's stare, and Whirl's spark chamber feels tight.
A tiny nod.
Whirl's arm shoots out to the side; he doesn't take his optic off Tailgate as he plucks the first clock off the top of the pile with a gentle claw. "...Take it," he says, a little too fiercely, shoving it into Tailgate's fumbling hands. Too obvious - Whirl needs to reel it in, fast, or he's going to make himself look like an awkward, sentimental fool. Chromedome Syndrome better not be contagious. Roughly, deliberately turning away from Tailgate with a dismissive huff, Whirl waves him away. "Knock yourself out." No, this isn't a big deal. Haha! Nope, couldn't care less.
Tailgate holds the clock carefully; it's blocky and rectangular and ugly against his frame, and Whirl despairs that this is the only clock he's made. Someone finally wants a clock, and this is the best he's got to offer? He wants to snatch it back and hand Tailgate something else. Anything but his terrible alarm clock. Augh.
Then Tailgate shakes himself, and his visor brightens in a brilliant smile. "Thank you!" he says, pressing the clock very, very carefully to his chest as he beams at Whirl. "Wow! I didn't think you actually would!" Then Tailgate spins on his heel and trots toward the empty doorframe, waving at Whirl as he heads out into the light of the corridor. "I'll see you around?"
Whirl can't remember how to make his voice work. Which is unfortunate, since he was using it not two seconds ago. "Yeah, yeah. Later," he forces out, just in time for Tailgate to wave with extra enthusiasm and then sprint out of sight.
His chest still feels abnormally tight. Whirl sits still for a long moment, pressing the side of his claw to his torso and massaging the metal, trying to identify why his spark chamber feels ready to implode. Tailgate's gone, just as suddenly as he arrived, so maybe none of that was real. The tight, stabbing happiness in Whirl's spark certainly doesn't feel real. He should probably get one of their rapidly plummeting number of medics to check on that. Maybe.
He doesn't have a mouth, and he can't smile. His holomatter avatar swings her legs over the upper edge of Whirl's optic socket, then rolls so that she's beaming at him upside down, her tiny human dentae bright and her eyes crinkled shut with irrepressible joy. [A watch, a watch! C'mon, we're making a watch], she chants at him, drumming the toes of her feet against his helm with a series of clumsy kicks. Whirl raises a claw for her to land on and then sets her on the desk. She drums the palms of her hands against his claw and then sprints over to the nearest wheel. Whirl's no judge of human age beyond the equivalent of protoform, autonomous, and greying, but she's wearing a new jacket, now, the shoulders studded with spikes, with an enormous pocket watch wreathed in flames stitched on the back panel. Her wrists are heavy with watches.
Whirl stretches his clenched claws. "Oh, frag yes, a watch," he agrees, a sensation burning too hot and rapturous in his spark to be called something as simple as joy.
When he lifts a screwdriver, it feels like a part of his hand.
