sparkling's first flight (whirlstorm)

04 December 2018

Brainstorm didn’t get it. Whirl had totally babysat for Skids and Swerve that one time, and it’d gone great. Of course he was gonna be a great parent.

That was a couple of gestation periods ago. More than that, actually, since they were fully out of that stage where the little thing they’d made looked mostly like an amorphous metallic shape, all gray and squinting, squished and soft. She’d gotten a lot more defined as time passed, as her metal figured out its shape, and Scuffle – that was her name, Scuffle, Whirl had said ‘what about something with one syllable’ and then said that and Brainstorm had lovingly told him he was dumb as hell – she’d started sprouting fingers and stabilizers and rotors. There’d been a little while where they weren’t sure which way she’d go with it, if she’d grow out blades like Whirl’s or if her plating would spread out into wings, and she kinda wobbled back and forth for a couple of weeks, nubs of wings growing and then smoothing out again. Whirl started a betting pool in the bar because he was supposed to stay off drinking while he recuperated or something ridiculous like that and he needed to distract himself. He cornered Drift and made him swear to make Primus make her go helicopter, even though Drift protested that that wasn’t how it worked at all.

So naturally when she finally settled on being a jet, Brainstorm paraded her around the halls crowing about it, Whirl hopping after him and swearing like a particularly pissed off bird.

It didn’t stop him from considering her the best mech to ever live, of course. Whirl doted on her like he’d only ever doted on live firearms, kept her in his arms more often than not, figured out the perfect way to arrange his curved claws so he could cradle her without hurting her. Some part of it broke him up when they were alone, just him and the little one, sometimes where Brainstorm could see and file the memory away as a gift and a blessing. She was a little tiny jet with little tiny wings now, and she was theirs, too.

And she was precocious as anything, which Brainstorm learned when he found Whirl lounging on the ground in a mostly-empty observatory, long legs crossed at the knee and arms pillowed behind his head as he watched a tiny shape swoop and sputter overhead.

“Hey,” Brainstorm said, stopping short in the door, pointing. “Hey, is that ours?”

“Uh-huh.” Whirl’s optic was curved into a happy little arc, tracking Scuffle as she dove dangerously close to the ground before catching herself, wings quivering and engines pushing as hard as they could to keep her in the air.

According to texts – not that there were all too many that Brainstorm had access to, here in deep space at the tail end of a war that was supposedly over – Scuffle was a couple months out from starting to use her alt mode for airborne travel. She shouldn’t have been able to really figure out her engines for at least a few more weeks. A minute passed where he could only feel utter glee that their daughter was clearly and without question a genius prodigy. But then Scuffle gave a high pitched “whoa!” and smacked nose-first into a window, did some somersaults backwards, collapsed in a heap in her root mode. She sat stunned for a second before frowning lopsided and picking herself up, ambling back towards Whirl and climbing up onto his cockpit, jumping off the high peak of it and switching back into alt mode to glide and force herself higher.

“You think we should be letting her do this stuff?” Brainstorm asked, watching her fly clumsily.

“Sure,” Whirl said. He pushed himself up a little on his elbows so he could actually look at Brainstorm over his cockpit. “Better she go ahead and clonk herself in the face when she’s still small enough to bounce, right? Gonna happen sometime. I tried putting blankets down but she caught one on fire with her lil’ tiny afterburners.”

“She’s got afterburners,” Brainstorm squeaked, voice tight with adoration, and Scuffle veered so close she clipped a wing against his middle and took a spinning dive down to the floor. Whirl reached out and caught her before she could make impact.

"Who’s a cute little dive bomber, huh?” he cooed, holding her up over him. She was still in alt mode and she giggled and her engines sputtered joyfully. Brainstorm’s legs seemed to unlock, then, and he crossed the room to sit on Whirl’s hips (“oof, Primus, d'you mind, you’re heavier than Magnus after a good meal”) and take Scuffle out of his claws and hold her up close.

“Your problem is that you’re getting tips from a helicopter,” Brainstorm told her in a conspiratorial sort of whisper. “He doesn’t know anything about finesse. All he knows is going up and down, anyone can do that.”

“Oh, what,” Whirl shouted, and they all went upside down when he reared up and toppled them, and Scuffle shrieked with laughter and Brainstorm cackled and really, honestly?

He didn’t understand at all why anyone had thought they’d be bad together, the three of them.