Work Text:
Perceptor had submitted the proposal to Rodimus three weeks into their voyage: a request to establish a temporary monitoring station on Kaldryn to study piezoelectric ice formations. The planet's crust contained crystalline structures that generated measurable electrical charges under pressure and temperature fluctuation. If the mechanism could be isolated and reproduced, the Lost Light's fuel efficiency could improve by as much as eight percent. Rodimus had approved it within an hour, probably without reading past the first paragraph.
The next day, Ultra Magnus summoned Perceptor to his office. Magnus didn't bother with preamble or praise, nor did he ask about the research value, or the risk, or anything that might have implied this was a conversation. He simply looked up from his paperwork and asked, as if the answer were already supposed to exist, who would be accompanying him.
Perceptor stared at the roster and, for one irrational moment, assumed Magnus had confused Kaldryn with an expedition. The station's workload had been calibrated for a single operator, and the maintenance schedule was built around one set of servos. A second mech was redundancy at best and interference at worst.
"I'll review this and return a recommendation," Perceptor said, because there were situations where politeness functioned as a delay tactic. He gathered the sheets with care, rose, and left Magnus to whatever satisfaction he took in forms that would, eventually, be filled.
Later, he submitted a request for a solo deployment and expected, if not agreement, then at least the courtesy of a rationale.
Magnus returned the form with a regulation number where an argument might have gone. Regulation Forty-seven: remote research stations required a paired posting. Along with it came a printout of the duty roster, as if the matter could be settled by placing enough paper between them.
It did not take long for the list to start defeating itself. Hound's name jumped out first, and with it the excavation survey stamped across his schedule for another two vorns. There was no pulling him without stalling work already in motion, and Perceptor could already hear Magnus saying that stalling an ongoing assignment for the sake of convenience was inefficient. Mainframe was worse, not because he was unwilling but because he was already threaded through three active projects with more waiting behind them. Reassigning him would mean redistributing half a queue, and Magnus would not do that for a research station.
After that, it became a familiar exercise in subtraction. When the list finally stopped giving him alternatives, it offered one last entry as if it were doing him a favor.
Brainstorm.
Perceptor did not contest it. He filed compliance, downloaded the equipment manifests, and recalculated the station's resource allocation for two instead of one.
The station itself sat in a shallow basin, spared the worst of the wind by ridges of ice that had been there long before any of them had names for it. The geography was the point: stable ground, predictable drift patterns, and enough shelter that the exterior arrays didn't need constant attention. Once deployed, the automated sensors could run for nearly a week without anyone stepping outside -- an arrangement Perceptor appreciated, given that the surface temperatures stayed well below anything that encouraged mechanical reliability. Their rotation was meant to last two deca-cycles.
Two deca-cycles were forty-two days. Brainstorm lasted a mere four before he started taking the station apart.
He started with the sort of objections that sounded technical until you checked them. The sensors were "off," he said, and Perceptor's verification routines returned the same calibration values they'd had when they left the ship. The collection intervals were "inefficient," he insisted, and Perceptor's own calculations showed the current schedule already balanced power draw against meaningful resolution. After a few rounds of this, Brainstorm stopped trying to win arguments and redirected his energy into the corner of the main lab, assembling something small enough to cup between his servos. He didn't volunteer an explanation. Perceptor stopped prompting for one; supplying attention as fuel was a variable he could at least remove, as he'd very quickly learned during their time on Kimia.
Hours passed that way. Perceptor worked through a recalibration on the western array when its readings began to jitter with artifact noise that mapped neatly onto the electromagnetic interference coming from Brainstorm's ongoing project. He compensated, adjusted shielding values, and ran another check. Across from him, Brainstorm's workstation went quiet. Perceptor looked up once, saw the familiar hunched posture and the complete lack of situational awareness, and returned to his own work.
The blizzard warning arrived while he was still logging the array's corrected output. Perceptor acknowledged the alert, pulled up the preparation checklist, and began moving through it without urgency. Shutters: responsive. Pressure: falling. Wind projections rising fast enough to make outside access a problem. They had time, but not enough to indulge in improvisation.
He turned toward Brainstorm's station to assign him something useful and found the chair empty.
For a moment, Perceptor assumed Brainstorm had stepped into the storage locker or was making use of the sanitation unit. He opened a comms channel. Nothing came back except the station's chirp. He tried again, waited, then pulled up the internal camera feeds. Brainstorm didn't appear in any of the common spaces.
Perceptor pulled up the access logs next. The external airlock had cycled shortly before the warning. That narrowed the possibilities to one, and it was the one Perceptor had been hoping not to confirm. He opened Brainstorm's tracker feed; the signal placed him outside, already putting distance between himself and the station, moving northwest over uneven terrain.
Perceptor watched the tracker's line hold its course, steady enough to rule out confusion and too direct to qualify as a search. He pulled up the external array's flags and skimmed the hour before the warning. The match was immediate: a subsurface anomaly in the same direction.
Calling the signal an "anomaly" was generous; the spike barely rose above baseline and could as easily have been ice settling under its own weight as anything with repeatable structure. Under ordinary conditions, Perceptor would have annotated it and moved on. It warranted a follow-up only after the storm, perhaps, with the correct survey kit and a margin for error that did not include exposure.
He closed the log and reopened it to verify the timestamps. The sequence did not change. Brainstorm had seen the blizzard warning and still stepped out to chase a reading that barely qualified as distinct from noise. Perceptor stared at the minutes since the airlock cycle and felt his irritation thin into something else entirely.
Brainstorm's frame, Perceptor knew, was built for speed and aerial maneuvering, light enough to snap through a tight turn without stressing the plating. It was an efficient design, clean in its compromises, the kind of engineering Perceptor could appreciate even when the rest of Brainstorm was… well, Brainstorm. Here, that efficiency reversed itself. Kaldryn would pull warmth out through every gap and joint until movement became effort and effort became failure.
He yanked the emergency supply pack off its hook hard enough to make the latch protest, keyed the airlock cycle, and went through without logging his departure. The console held out its polite request for a timestamp. He let it expire.
The outer door unsealed, and Kaldryn's cold found the weak points immediately. His systems rerouted energon on reflex, yanking power back from anything nonessential. The temperature readout on his HUD registered negative one hundred forty-two degrees and kept falling.
He set his heading by Brainstorm's tracker and started walking.
The distance ticked down as the station fell behind him and the terrain opened into low, broken ridges of ice. Just over a kilometer. Under that.
He found Brainstorm crouched beside a fissure in the ice, shoulders hunched as if that could make him warmer. Some kind of miniature scanner was clutched in both servos, and he was angled toward the crack with rapt attention.
"Brainstorm!"
Brainstorm's helm snapped up. Even through the frost accumulating on his optics, Perceptor could see the surprise. "Percy! I was just -- there's a power signature down there that doesn't match anything in our database, and I thought if I could get a closer reading before the storm interfered--"
"Get up." Perceptor grabbed his arm and hauled him upright, too hard -- his spark was doing something complicated behind his chest plating, and he couldn't regulate his strength properly. The temperature differential registered immediately through his servos. Brainstorm's plating was already down to ambient. His processor started calculating failure cascades -- when, how fast, which subsystems first -- and he forced it to stop. "We're leaving."
"I've been tracking the atmospheric pressure," Brainstorm said. "It's stable. It hasn't fallen since--"
"Check your core temperature."
Brainstorm went quiet, optics dulling by a fraction while his systems worked through a diagnostic sweep.
"So," he said after a beat, like he could negotiate with the results if he phrased it correctly. He swallowed, then tried again. "Okay. My intake vents are… yeah, they're frozen. Partially." His gaze flicked toward Perceptor and away again. "Mostly."
"Come on." Perceptor tightened his hold on Brainstorm's arm and pulled. The ice slid under his pedes; he compensated, kept the pull steady, refused to let their pace break. Brainstorm's vents rasped with each pull of air, and his frame lagged on the follow-through: a fraction late to lift a pede, a fraction late to set it down. By the fifth step, Brainstorm was dragging.
They made it four hundred meters before the storm hit.
The wind hit at an angle that shoved them sideways -- harder than Perceptor's projections -- driving ice grit up off the flats until the horizon vanished and the station's beacon turned into a smear that told him less and less about where "back" was supposed to be. Beside him, Brainstorm stumbled.
Perceptor got an arm around him before the fall finished, pulling him back upright, and Brainstorm shuddered against the hold.
"Move," Perceptor said, and tightened his grip as if the extra force could substitute for heat. The word left no room for debate. It had been a long time since he'd spoken like that -- it had been a long time since he'd handled another mech like this. He didn't like what it did to the part of him that still remembered being assigned to battlefields instead of labs; he used it anyway. "Now. Keep moving."
They weren't going to make it back to the station. Not at this pace, not with Brainstorm's core temperature sliding toward the threshold where the failsafes started taking pieces of him offline -- first comfort systems, then nonessential sensors, then anything that could be spared. Conservation was supposed to buy time. Out here, it did the opposite. Less activity meant less heat, which triggered another round of shutdowns, which meant less activity. A loop so neat Perceptor himself could have written it up.
There was… not a shelter, no, but one of the array service pods they'd installed against the western ridge, a compact blister meant for calibrations and swaps when going all the way back to the main module would waste time. Airtight and insulated, but with no heat or power, and barely any room to turn around. Perceptor had signed off on it because the deployment kit came with it, and arguing would have meant three more forms stamped with Regulation Forty-seven's relatives.
Perceptor changed course without announcing it. He tightened his grip on Brainstorm's arm and angled them into the lee of a low ridge, using the ice itself as a break against the wind. The gusts still found them, but not with the same clean force; here it came in dirty bursts that shoved and released, shoved and released, like something trying to dislodge them from the surface.
The service pod was half-buried in drift, the hatch marked with a strip of hazard paint that had already started to peel at the edges. Perceptor got his digits under the latch, pulled, and felt it resist; frozen hinges, ice packed into the seam. He braced his shoulder against the door and wrenched again until something cracked loose.
Getting Brainstorm over the entrance took longer than opening the pod. Brainstorm's legs tried to fold, then did. Perceptor hauled him by the upper arm and shoulder, dragging him inside in a way that would have been humiliating if Brainstorm had been fully online. The pod's interior was barely wider than their frames. It didn't feel warmer so much as less intent on killing them.
Perceptor sealed the door and turned, and Brainstorm slid down the wall and sat hard, helm bowed as if his frame had forgotten what holding itself upright felt like.
Perceptor crouched in the pod's cramped half-light and put his palm against the plating over Brainstorm's spark. His HUD obligingly overlaid the proximity scan across Brainstorm's torso: Core temperature at thirty percent of standard operating range.
Another eight percent drop and Brainstorm's spark chamber would kick into emergency protocols to protect the spark itself, and if that happened, it would lock him down and keep him there until the reserves ran dry. With the way his systems were already compensating and failing, that gave them a little under four hours. Better than the seventeen minutes he'd had outside, but the margin was thin when the pod offered only insulation, not heat.
Perceptor tore the emergency pack free and split the seal. The contents spilled into his lap: thermal wrap, chemical heat cells, spare gaskets, a flare strip -- Magnus's idea of preparedness. Cheap, inelegant solutions. The kind Brainstorm would normally mock with an entire lecture about efficiency and why bother.
Perceptor had mocked them too, silently, when he'd inventoried the kit. Now he stripped the wrap out and snapped two heat cells to activation.
"I need you to keep your systems active. Don't let them drop into shutdown."
"'m trying." The words came out forced through layers of static. Brainstorm's optics flickered, focusing on him with visible effort. "It's… it's not -- I can't. It's cold."
Perceptor ran a full diagnostic and held his stare on the numbers. The heat cells were active, but the pod's insulation bled most of it away; the little chemical bricks could only warm the air they were losing to the walls. Brainstorm's core temperature crept upward by fractions and stalled again, as if it had found a ceiling and decided to stay there.
He tugged the supply pack out of the way, shoved it into the corner, and shifted closer.
"I'm going to try something."
"What -- Percy, what are you--"
Perceptor placed a servo on Brainstorm's shoulder plating and leaned in, bringing his chestplate to rest on Brainstorm's torso. The contact was immediate and unpleasant: Brainstorm's plating was cold enough that Perceptor's surface temperature dropped by several degrees. The transfer rate spiked on his internal monitoring; he dismissed it and adjusted his stance so there was less space between them.
"Heat transfer," he said. He made himself settle, shifting until his frame lay flush against Brainstorm, then braced his hips in an effort to keep Brainstorm pinned to the wall without crushing him. "Passive thermal exchange. Basic thermodynamics."
"You're -- You're going to freeze yourself."
"My thermal regulation is built for longer endurance under stress than yours is. Stay still."
Brainstorm's reply came out as a rough exhale through half-cleared vents. It wasn't assent so much as the sound his systems could afford.
Right. That gave him something to do with his servos. Perceptor peeled his chestplate back just enough to free one servo and went for Brainstorm's intakes. The frost there wasn't a single blockage; it had layered and re-layered, feathered along the grilles and packed tight around the filters. Perceptor worked in increments, levering out crystals with the edge of a digit, then using the flat of his thumb to sweep the loosened ice away before it could crumble deeper.
Air started moving again. Not cleanly at first, but the rhythm changed, and Brainstorm finally began to draw breath that didn't hitch.
Thirty-one percent, his HUD reported, ticking upward in stubborn increments.
"Perceptor--"
"Don't talk."
"I can't feel my--"
"Conserve your energy." He slid a servo to Brainstorm's chest. The casing over the spark chamber gave him a faint pulse, weak and spaced out, but the pulse existed, which was something. Perceptor left his palm there for a moment, measuring the interval by habit, then let his attention pivot back to heat transfer.
If surface contact mattered, then he could improve it by being selective about where he made contact. Proximity to energon lines outweighed sheer area, and heat bled fastest where the fuel conduits ran near the plating.
He shifted his grip down, digits finding the breaks in Brainstorm's armour at the waist seam where plating layered thinner over internal routing. The seams there offered purchase. They also offered access. Perceptor pressed his thumbs firm into the seam lines on either side, the way he'd apply pressure to a cracked casing to keep a seal closed.
Brainstorm jerked -- small, involuntary -- and made a sound that caught in his vents.
Perceptor glanced up once, noted the dilation in Brainstorm's optics, then refocused on the numbers.
"Core temperature at thirty-three percent of standard operating range." He kept his servos where they were. "Improving."
The cold under Perceptor's palms eased by a fraction. Not from Perceptor -- Brainstorm was producing heat again, a weak return, but enough that thirty-three ticked to thirty-four and kept moving.
Perceptor adjusted again for maximum surface area, shifting his weight lower so it wasn't all concentrated through his chestplate. In the cramped pod, the movement was awkward; his knee slid between Brainstorm's thighs as he resettled, and Brainstorm twitched hard enough to register through the contact.
Perceptor logged it as another tremor variation and corrected his angle so the weight distributed more evenly across Brainstorm's torso and hip plating. He didn't spare attention for the fact that his leg was now pinned there, or what the placement implied. The only thing that mattered was that Brainstorm's systems were stabilizing.
Thirty-six percent, his HUD updated, and the rise finally picked up speed.
Perceptor shifted one servo higher, checking the temperature gradient along the upper casing near the spark chamber. The pulse he found wasn't steadier, but it was… faster. Fast enough to trip his recovery parameters.
He stilled, holding the contact without increasing pressure. Elevated spark rate could be a compensatory response. It could also be a sign of internal damage trying to mask itself as effort. He initiated a secondary scan, checking the fuel lines, seals, intake routing, internal temperature differentials -- anything that would explain why Brainstorm's core was climbing while his spark rate overshot the expected recovery band.
The results returned clean.
Perceptor stared at the readout for a beat longer than he needed to, then put his palm back where the casing was warmest and kept the contact steady, as if the data would eventually decide to make sense if he gave it enough time.
"How are you feeling?"
Brainstorm didn't answer right away. His optics stayed too bright, fixed on nothing in the cramped pod, and when Perceptor slid two digits along his side to check the seam lines for ice intrusion, the frame under him shivered.
"Brainstorm."
"Fine." The word came out tight. "Just -- don't stop. Still cold."
Perceptor's readouts didn't support that. The thermal map was climbing in clean gradients from the wrap and the heat cells, the worst of the drop easing off. He watched the numbers, then looked back down at what he could feel under his servos: the slow return of pliancy in the plating, the vibration of fans that had been stuttering and now held a rhythm.
Brainstorm shifted again. He tried to angle his pelvic plating away, a subtle scoot that didn't get him far in a space this narrow, and Perceptor registered it only because he'd been kneeling too close, weight distributed across Brainstorm's thigh and hip assembly. The movement pushed muscle plating against Perceptor's leg. It wasn't forceful, more like an instinctive correction, and then Brainstorm went rigid as if he'd decided motion was a mistake.
Perceptor leaned closer, letting the wrap keep what heat it could while he checked the neck cabling. The metal under his digits was warming fast, and he could feel the energon flow smoothing out now. He traced the cable housing with his thumb, feeling for a fracture line or the telltale give of stressed casing.
Brainstorm made a sound that Perceptor initially filed as pain.
Core temperature at forty-one percent.
"Your core temperature is recovering well," Perceptor said. "Another few minutes and you should be stable enough to--"
The sentence stopped because Brainstorm's fans were cycling harder now, despite the temperature in the pod, pushing warm exhaust into Perceptor's forearm where it rested across Brainstorm's midsection. The thermal overlay agreed that the core was climbing, but a second band of heat was building off-center, too high along the back plating to be a simple recovery spillover.
Perceptor frowned at the overlay, then at Brainstorm's vents. He'd cleared them out already; there was no ice left to choke intake or force this kind of output. He hadn't felt any leak along the seals, either. The numbers were doing what they were supposed to do, and the hardware was reacting like something was wrong.
Perhaps it was merely overcompensation; a frame coming back online too aggressively after cold exposure could spike heat generation, dump power into the wrong loops for a few cycles -- but the patterns didn't match the usual cascade, and the distribution made no engineering sense. You did not feed excess into periphery while your core was still rebuilding margin. You didn't, unless something else had started demanding power.
Periphery, on an aerial frame, meant dorsal systems first.
Perceptor held still long enough for the implication to settle into place. Flight-control loop. The control lines at the wing roots were dense and touch-sensitive by necessity, built to accept micro-corrections and translate them into balance. If those systems had woken up out of phase, they'd start hunting for stability that wasn't there, pulling power to the dorsal exchanger and bleeding heat into the wrong circuits. The subsystem was chewing through energon because it thought it had work to do.
Perceptor shifted carefully and reached behind Brainstorm, digits finding the lip of a dorsal panel. The pod was too narrow for anything graceful; his knuckle plating brushed the ridge of Brainstorm's spinal strut as he slid his servo under the panel seam and pressed two digits to the hinge housing at the wing root.
Brainstorm's entire frame went rigid.
One moment his frame was pliant under Perceptor's touch, the next, every strut seized. His servos curled hard against the decking, digits scraping for purchase, and his optics flared white-bright, so intense Perceptor had to blink against the glare. The sound that came from his vents was harsh, full of static, and then his whole frame convulsed. Cooling fans roared online at maximum output, his back arched off the floor--
--and Perceptor understood, too late, far too late, what he'd just done. He jerked his servo back, but didn't move. He couldn't process what was happening fast enough to do anything except stay exactly where he was.
The overload tore through Brainstorm in waves. His vents cycled erratically, frame shaking under Perceptor's touch, and the quality of heat rolling off him had changed; no longer the dangerous flatline of failing regulation, but something that made Perceptor suddenly, acutely aware of every point of contact between them.
He should move. The medical emergency had passed.
Fine tremors ran through Brainstorm's frame. Perceptor could feel every one through his servo on Brainstorm's waist, his knees pressed against Brainstorm's hips, his chest plating almost touching as he leaned over him. Brainstorm had just overloaded… from proximity. From Perceptor touching him during thermal stress, and his processor was assembling an explanation he absolutely did not want.
"I--" Brainstorm's vocalizer glitched, fracturing the word.
Perceptor sat back, and the loss of contact felt abrupt. His servos moved to his own thighs because that seemed safest. Brainstorm stayed on his back, staring at the ceiling like he was trying to will himself into the storm outside.
"Your core temperature is at sixty-three percent," Perceptor said, because clinical observation was the only thing his processor would provide. The statement sounded absurd even as he said it -- profoundly inadequate, almost offensive in its neutrality -- but the words kept coming. "Thermal regulation appears to have stabilized. Energon flow is within acceptable parameters."
Brainstorm's faceplate stayed pointed away from him. "Yeah. I'm -- I'm good. Warm. Very warm."
Medical protocol said Perceptor should monitor for residual damage and ensure the rapid temperature shift hadn't compromised anything critical. Medical protocol said nothing about what to do when the patient overloaded from the warming itself, or what it meant that the ghost of contact still lingered in Perceptor's sensors -- the heat of Brainstorm's armor, the way every tremor had transmitted directly through the contact points between them.
And medical protocol certainly didn't address Brainstorm's EM field. Perceptor had been so focused on diagnostic overlays and temperature readings that he'd filtered out the field entirely -- but now, one point four meters away with nothing between them but cold air, he could feel it. Brainstorm's field was pulled in tight, locked down in a way that spoke of mortification rather than malfunction. How had he missed it? The field had been open during the warming process, broadcasting want so clearly that Perceptor should have registered it immediately, but he'd been cataloging spark rate and energon pressure while Brainstorm's field told him everything the scans couldn't.
Perceptor's processor offered him nothing useful. He pulled up the weather data on his HUD instead, forcing his attention to wind velocity projections that didn't need studying. The sharp scent of fresh transfluid registered somewhere in that attempt at distraction: metallic and slightly acidic. He couldn't help but look when Brainstorm's servos went to his interface panel and sealed it with a sharp click -- as if the panel had been open this entire time, as if Brainstorm's systems were still trying to dissipate charge that had nowhere to go. Perceptor's optics tracked the motion before he could stop himself. A thin line of transfluid traced down from the panel seam, catching the dim light before disappearing into the gap between armor plates.
He jerked his gaze back to his HUD. That was easier to look at than Brainstorm, who had moved to the far wall and hadn't said anything in the two minutes since his cooling fans had finally cycled down to normal speeds.
Perceptor reached for the thermal wrap they'd used earlier. "You should--" His vocalizer caught. He cleared it and tried again. "There's residue. From the..."
Brainstorm's faceplate stayed pointed away from him.
Perceptor folded a section of the wrap into a clean square, then shifted closer with minute movements that kept him from making contact. "May I?"
"You don't have to--"
"It will freeze in the seam. The panel seal could stick."
For a long moment, nothing. Then Brainstorm gave a small nod without turning his helm.
Perceptor pressed the fabric against the seam where Brainstorm's interface panel met his pelvic plating, and the transfluid wicked into the material immediately. He focused on wiping the plating clean with small strokes.
Brainstorm's vents hitched, and Perceptor stilled. "Am I causing discomfort?"
"No, no. Just -- sensitive."
Perceptor resumed with lighter pressure, working down the seam line and across to where transfluid had pooled in a recessed section of armor. He wiped the last visible trace away and sat back, refolding the wrap so the soiled section faced inward. His servos felt too warm.
"Done." He set the wrap aside. "The storm should pass in approximately six hours. Current readings indicate--"
"Six hours." Brainstorm's voice had gone flat. "Great. That's -- yeah. Great."
Perceptor wanted to point out that "great" was not an accurate descriptor of their situation. He wanted to ask if Brainstorm was experiencing discomfort, but asking would require specifying what kind of discomfort, and he couldn't frame that question without acknowledging what had happened. Easier to pull the emergency supply pack closer and catalog contents he'd already inventoried. Thermal wrap, chemical heat cells, spare gaskets, a flare strip, and a portable comm unit.
…The comm. Right. Perceptor picked it up, turned it over in his servos once, twice, then activated it before he could overthink the brief message he needed to send. "Perceptor to the Lost Light. Taking shelter in the service pod near the western ridge. Both functional. Will return when the storm passes."
Static, then: "Acknowledged. Remain sheltered."
Perceptor deactivated the comm and set it down. Now there was nothing left to inventory, and six hours ahead of them.
The pod was warming. Negative forty degrees Celsius now, according to his sensors. Perceptor decided to run another passive scan; Brainstorm's core temperature had stabilized at seventy-three percent of normal operating range, and his spark rate was still elevated, but not dangerously so. Energon pressure slightly above baseline, consistent with post-overload response. Everything was functioning as expected for a mech who had nearly gone into emergency stasis and then… everything after that.
"I'm sorry."
Perceptor's optics snapped to Brainstorm, but the jet still wasn't looking at him. His voice was quiet, made smaller by the faceplate he still hadn't removed. "That was -- I didn't mean for that to happen."
Something twisted in Perceptor's spark. He should reassure Brainstorm, explain that overload responses under severe thermal stress were documented, and that his systems had simply sought the fastest route to temperature regulation. It would be accurate. It would also be incomplete, because the literature addressed therapeutic heat transfer conducted by medical professionals who weren't kneeling between their patients' legs with servos on waist and wing-root sensors while the patient's interface panels opened.
"You were experiencing severe thermal stress." The words came out clipped. "Physiological responses under those conditions can be unpredictable."
"Right, yeah. Thermal stress. Unpredictable physiological responses. That's -- that tracks. Makes sense. Total sense, actually, when you think about the core temperature differential and the, uh, the proximity factors, so--" Brainstorm stopped. Started again. "Yeah."
Perceptor wanted to find words that would smooth over the jagged awkwardness between them, but his processor couldn't identify what those words might be. Six hours to not discuss what had happened. When they returned to the station, they could file their reports and continue working as though nothing had happened, and Perceptor could stop thinking about the way Brainstorm's plating had felt under his servos or the precise scent signature of his transfluid or--
Perceptor pulled an energon ration from the supply pack and broke it in half with more force than necessary. He held out one piece, arm extended just far enough that Brainstorm wouldn't have to come close to take it.
Brainstorm hesitated. The pause wasn't long, but Perceptor's internal chronometer counted every beat of it. Then Brainstorm reached out and accepted the ration with careful digits. "Thanks."
They worked through the energon in silence. The gel went down thick and metallic, and Perceptor's systems flagged the calories as adequate rather than pleasant. Across the pod's thin walls, the blizzard kept throwing itself at them; each heavier gust shuddered through the frame and made the bolt heads in the corner tremble.
"…The power signature you were investigating. What did your preliminary readings indicate?"
The silence stretched long enough that Perceptor began composing alternative conversational gambits, but then Brainstorm shifted against the wall and said, "Subsurface energy pattern. The wavelength didn't match any of the piezoelectric harmonics you logged. Didn't match Kaldryn's background noise either. It was… cleaner. Structured."
"Structured? How?"
Brainstorm's servos came up, palms open, as if he could show the shape of a wave with empty air. "Periodic spikes with a decay curve that repeats. Like a pulse train. I kept thinking it looked artificial, but it wasn't any broadcast band we use. It could be a buried power source. Or a device. Or some kind of exotic matter that's doing something clever under pressure. I wanted a closer reading before the storm started throwing interference all over the spectrum." He added the last part quickly, almost as an afterthought, and then went still again.
"Instead you nearly went into emergency stasis."
"I didn't--" Brainstorm's faceplate tilted toward him fractionally. "I wasn't that far gone."
Perceptor brought up the timestamp overlay and held it there. "Seventeen minutes from complete systems failure when I located you."
"I was monitoring my systems."
"You were not monitoring adequately."
Perceptor felt his cooling fans kick a notch higher, not because the pod was warm but because his systems had decided they needed the outlet. The anger would have been simpler if it had been purely anger, but it had teeth from a different source, from the forty-seven minutes spent walking in hostile weather, watching a signal point on his HUD, and trying not to run failure projections on it. His servos still remembered the shock of how cold Brainstorm's arm had been when he grabbed it. How close the readings had been to the point where Brainstorm would stop being able to move at all.
"You saw the blizzard warning," he said, keeping his vocalizer steady. "And you chose to leave anyway."
"…I thought I could get it fast. Two minutes, maybe. I thought I could bring you something you didn't already have."
There it was. Not guilt exactly, and definitely not apology, but the shape of it was familiar all the same: the need to justify himself as useful, as worth bringing along, as more than a regulation-mandated second body at a station built for one. It pulled a memory up unwanted: Brainstorm in the lab, hunched over some half-built device, talking faster than his own thoughts when Perceptor asked a question that sounded like approval. Brainstorm's need to produce something impressive was not subtle. He disguised it as bravado and called it curiosity, but it fooled no one who had watched him long enough.
Perceptor's processor offered him several ways to respond that would be correct, and none of them would be kind. He let them pass. "You do not have to manufacture merit," he said instead, and regretted the phrasing immediately. It sounded like a reprimand from an instructor; Brainstorm deserved better than that even now. He tried again, more carefully. "You were assigned because of regulation. That does not mean you are expendable."
Brainstorm didn't move for a moment. Then his optics brightened, and the tension in his frame eased by small degrees. "For what it's worth," he said, "I'm glad you came after me."
Perceptor's vocalizer locked, and for a moment, he couldn't force anything past it. "I was--" He stopped. Tried again. "Worried." The admission came out quieter than he'd intended, but he forced himself to continue before his processor could offer him an escape route. "We have worked in proximity for a long time. Your theories are unconventional -- and often inefficient -- but I have learned more from dismantling your more creative failures than from most successful experiments. I would not have wanted that to end out here."
Brainstorm's servos flexed once against his knees before he pressed them flat. Neither of them said anything else.
Six hours and seventeen minutes after they'd sealed themselves inside, the storm's fury finally broke. Wind velocity dropped below fifty kilometers per hour, and visibility outside improved to acceptable ranges. They cycled through the airlock in silence, emerged into a landscape of fresh snow and brutal cold, and walked back to the research station, maintaining exactly two full meters of distance between them.
Perceptor filed his incident report in his quarters an hour later: environmental exposure incident, emergency shelter protocol enacted, both personnel recovered without permanent system damage. He marked it complete and encrypted it, then sat at his desk and stared at the screen for longer than necessary.
The diagnostic logs from the pod were still in his memory core. He pulled them up despite knowing it was a poor decision, isolating the specific segment where Brainstorm's systems had gone into overload. Spark rate progression: baseline 47 pulses per cycle, escalating to 89, peaking at 103 before the cascade. Energon pressure patterns showing the standard arterial dilation, concentrated in the primary fuel lines, and -- Perceptor expanded the thermal overlay -- radiating outward from contact points on the chassis plating. The exact contact points where Perceptor's servos had been.
Perceptor saved the diagnostic logs to an encrypted file, attached a timestamp and location tag, and tried not to examine too closely why he was preserving them at all.