Archive of Our Own ^beta

There are some things in this world that Noah Diaz understands–things like the electronics under his hands and the pliers half-shoved to the side. The little metal resistor ends poke into his fingertips as he folds the legs and trims the excess, leaving little indents in his skin when he presses each resistor away to the tabletop. The pliers are still cool, unwarmed like the resistor was by his hands; it’s an oddly toasty morning for outside of deep summer, and the humidity hangs high.

“Noah,” says Mirage, holoform resting chin atop his folded fist. “Maybe we should, you know, get out of here for a little?”

“No.” Noah snips again. The legs are too short; the resistor doesn’t reach across its slot, and he holds back a hiss behind his teeth.

“I know, I know, you’re busy, and Chris has to stay atop his treatment schedule, and your ma has a very busy schedule too. What abou–”

"No.”

Mirage blinks at him, light flickering in the half-bright of the workspace. “Alright.”

Alright. No ‘man,’ no ‘my boy,’ nothing of the sort. Just ‘Alright.’ And Mirage is quiet. Noah finally hisses, bleeding over the breadboard where the resistor’s metal nicked him. He sets the piece down and suckles his fingertip, iron, salt, and something he refuses to call regret heady on his tongue.

Mirage is quiet. His holoform is solid today, at least in terms of maintaining its form; perks of lower energy draw, Noah presumes.

Hm. Energy draw? Energy drain? That would explain a few things.

“‘Raj?”

The Porsche straightens. “Yea?”

Noah pulls his finger out, dries it on one of the rags at his side. “Tell me about your outlier ability again.” He glances up, catches a hint of moving blue and white. “Only if you wanna.”

“Yeah, okay.”

There are other things that Noah Diaz does not understand. “It’s called ‘recharge,’ right?” Noah asks. His back is warm; Mirage’s leather is warmer. “How do you self-charge?”

Mirage snickers. It’s tinny over the in-car stereo, but the message comes across clearly enough. “Honestly, it’s more like sleep. Detoxes everything up there, fixes some wear and tear, makes connections, et cetera. Fuel’s energon, though.”

Noah’s face is flat in the windshield reflection. “Huh. Can you run on actual vehicle fuel, then? Maybe the renewables?” He gives no indication of his hand, nor of his chips on the board, and around him, the Porsche purrs.

“Probably not,” Mirage admits.

“But you’re hotwire-able,” Noah continues.

“Yeah.”

“So you have a battery?”

The night is cool, but still dripping with humidity off the harbor. Mirage idles at a red. “Yeah, I have a battery. Batteries. Main power source’s my spark, like my heart. It charges all the batteries when they run low.”

“Hm. So there’s a bunch of other batteries to run separate systems?”

“Yeah, and the spark’s there to make sure they don’t run dry.”

Noah pops his mouth. There’s nothing for him to nibble on–no matter how much Mirage tries to convince him otherwise, he simply refuses to eat inside another living being–so he has to make do with the simple motion. “Hologen run on a separate system?”

“You got it.” The light goes out, goes green. Mirage goes, too, unminding of the other meandering drivers out in the late-night. New York never really sleeps. “Separate battery set, plus separate capacitors to store the charge, and everything else that comes with it.”

Noah is quiet. It makes the click of Mirage’s turn signal that much louder. “You ok, man?”

“Yes,” Noah confirms. Quietly.

Mirage internally raises an eyebrow and lets it be. He’ll get his fair share of talking later, anyways, with Chris always sticking his nose into his big brother’s car–and that car’s business.

Noah may be good at keeping quiet, but he’s lost his knack for keeping secrets. Or, at least, that’s all he can presume when Chris patters over with some Pringles for him, still in an unopened can.

“I know, I know, ‘no eating in the lab,’” Chris parrots before Noah gets the chance to mutter it in his direction. “When’d you last have water, though?”

Chris doesn’t giggle, but Noah can’t help but mentally insert one into the space between them. It’s the quiet of familiarity, of not needing anything else to say, as Chris slides him the chips and raises a bottle of water for him to see. The chips stay atop Noah’s workbench; the water gets tucked against its leg, on the ground, to minimize damage and danger.

Good call. Noah nods at him, and Chris removes the lid and cover, placing a napkin and disposable chopsticks over the top instead. “So you don’t have to eat with your hands,” he prompts, and Noah hums.

It’s rare to be pleasantly surprised in this day and age, so Noah gives him a fist bump instead of all the words he doesn’t know right now. “Thanks, bud,” he cuts out once the inductor’s in place. It’s bulky, and Noah fidgets with the chopsticks as he points the top of the Pringles stack towards his brother. Sure enough, Chris snags a couple with his right hand, sticking them on top of his tongue so the salt tingles and burns. Noah shakes his head.

Some Pringles-eating crimes can, in fact, be forgiven.

“What’s that? Never seen you use one before.” Chris’s finger is, of course, hovering over the new circuit element.

“Inductor,” Noah replies. He takes his first chip, hangs onto it with the chopsticks as he uses his other hand to point and trace the flow of current. “Low impedance at low frequencies, high impedance at high frequencies.”

“That’s like an opposite-capacitor, right?”

“Kinda, yeah.” Noah’s lips quirk up, and he points out the matching inductor across the gap. “This is called a ‘transformer,’ actually. I poked around a bit in ‘Raj before, and sure enough, they have ‘em in there. I wonder if the term came from the lingo, if that’s why people are calling ‘em Transformers.”

“Maybe.” Chris chews his chip. “I dunno, from all you’ve said, sounds a little weird not to say ‘Autobots’ and ‘Maximals’ and ‘Terrorcons.’”

Noah shrugs and flicks the AC generator off. The transformer sparks, and Chris jumps back. “Ah?!”

“It’s alright. Sometimes sparks when the power’s cut.”

“Is that safe to have at home??” Chris’s eyes are wide, but equally with dread and delight.

“Safe as an alien in the garage,” Noah admits. “If we’re properly careful, we’ll be fine.” He scoots back from the workbench, uncaps the water bottle, and takes a swig.

“Like your alien boyfriend!”

Water drips around Noah’s lips. “He’s not my boyfriend. We’re partners.”

“Uh-huh. Partners.”

“Work partners, Chris.”

“Same difference. I’ve heard how he talks about you, and I know how much you do for him.” He bumps Noah’s arm–the one not holding the open water–with the bone of his shoulder. “How can I help?”

Noah stares at him a moment, at his gentle eyes and serious expression, and pulls up the second stool. “Pass me the brown-black-red-gold resistor,” he says.

“Brown-1, black-0, red-2… that’s a 1k!”

It takes more than a single day, of course, as most analog circuits still do for Noah. With more building experience comes more debugging experience, but his notes are extra thorough on this attempt.

Coming back to his builds in the morning, with a fresh mind, is often what helps him break through. The number of times he’s cut corners in the past is likely more than he should admit if he wants to protect his pride–but this time, he takes it slow. There's no one relying on this comm operator for speed these days.

“Still don’t need my help?” Chris asks, perched atop the stool at Noah’s side.

“I will soon,’ Noah assures him. “Just checking the impedances, then you’ll have to run cover for me.”

“I get to distract Mirage?” Chris’s voice is eagerly pitched in a manner Noah knows by heart, and he bites down a smile.

“Yeah, you do. Gonna need him busy today, he's getting nosey.”

Chris does giggle at that, and Noah flashes him a grin over his shoulder. “What’re you doing with the impedances?”

Noah flexes out his cramping fingers with a sigh. Even with the pliers and everything in hand, he’s doing too much detail work. He really does need a break. “I’m impedance bridging. Making sure the impedance of the load stage is at least ten-x the impedance of the source.” Noah doesn’t need to ask to know Chris is a little lost, so he takes a breath and tries again. “Making sure there’s not too much current being drawn from the battery, which means there’s less wasted power.”

“Oh!” Chris lightens up, tracing over the op-amp Noah installed before snagging his brother’s hand and working the tired muscles. “Op-amp, right? Good buffers?”

“Exactly.” Noah swallows around the lump in his throat. “I just have to double check it’s working right before I, you know, plug it into him.”

“Don’t try this at home,” Chris parrots, likely from some television program he’s been watching while up later than he should be.

Noah keeps a careful watch on the oscilloscope readings. His new line of work certainly has some perks; he has enough to spare that he’s already replaced the inductors with op-amps, and his scope is still what Mirage called “shiny and new.” From there, he calculates by hand; the numbers are easy enough.

“Alright, Tails. Mission is a go.”

Chris scrambles up from his stool. “Leave it to me!”

For a ride inside a sentient car, this one is particularly uneventful. Noah rests with his build box balanced across his palms as Mirage drives, but he perks up when Mirage pulls over and turns down the radio. They’re outside the city already; they must have been driving for far longer than Noah realized.

“Something on your mind?”

Mirage’s voice crackles over the Porsche stereo, and Noah bumps his upper thighs against the steering wheel in acknowledgement. “Guess so.”

“Has to do with me, huh? Can you tell me what I did to put you off?”

Noah stares at his own reflection in the driver’s side window, past it to the fluorescent yellow of the great entanglement of electricity. “Yes, but it’s not.... It’s not a quip, and I’m not uncomfortable with you, ‘Raj, I promise.”

The stereo’s Autobot symbol flickers. “That’s good. I’m infamously annoying.”

He huffs, but makes a mental note of the admission. “Not annoying, just.... don’t like seeing you run yourself empty. Especially not in the situations where you’re having to hold onto all your projections, and I know your spark recharges those batteries, I know, but what if...."

Noah goes quiet, the black box–the silver box–in his lap shivering as his hands shake. “If....”

“If it fully drains me?”

The man sighs, leans his head against the cool glass of Mirage’s window. “Yeah. That’s the danger with outliers, right?”

For once, Mirage isn’t joking around. He merely rumbles once, deep, before the stereo crackles to life with two simple words: “It is.”

Noah sighs. It comes out ragged.

His eyes are pinched closed, so he isn’t aware Mirage is transforming around him until he’s gently transferred onto the bot’s waiting palm. “Noah, hey,” Mirage says. Noah isn’t quite sure if it’s meant to be a reassurance or the start of a question, but he tucks his knees up to his chin around the box and takes two steadying breaths. If he ignores the tears dripping down, they’ll go away.

Hey, his little brother had said, back before Noah had gone out to the meeting place with box in tow. It’s ok to cry, you know? You always told me it was ok to cry during transfusions, because it means I’m fighting through it all. And you don’t have to fight through it all alone, remember? Team. And we’re ‘Raj’s team, too. I already gave him the shovel talk, so he’s family.

“Hey, Sonic,” Chris’s voice flickers over the airwaves, long-range radio crackling to life on Noah’s receiver. “Is he making you cry? If he’s making you cry, tell him Imma strip him for parts so you can build more transformer circuits.”

Noah hiccups, ducking his chin, unwilling to move his hands to wipe his face. Mirage slips a servo in the gap, slowly, slower than Noah had ever expected he could go, until Noah’s chin is tilted back up. The bot coos, but Noah, for once in his life, doesn’t draw away. “Hey Tails,” Mirage drawls, “The answer’s yes. You can strip me for parts once we’re done having our heart-to-heart.”

Silence, then a few crackles. “You.... you go ahead and do that, Knuckles.”

Mirage heaves what passes for a sigh. Noah curls in, raising his hands and letting the box fall to his lap. The wrist’s warm when Noah tucks his face into it, warm from their race through the hustle and bustle and into the quiet. “Don’t wanna see you do that again.”

The ever-present grease smell from Mirage’s repairs is slowly fading, but Noah doesn’t think he’ll ever get the smell of his energon, of his oil lines, out of his hair. He shivers in the warm night air, and Mirage squats down so they’re eye-to-eye....or, eye-to-optic. Noah knows how he’s moving even without his eyes open, can feel the direction and distribution of the little air currents dancing through his curls.

“Promise me, ‘Raj. I mean it.”

The Porsche purrs in a way Noah knows must be instinct, a calming instinct, like the purr of a cat. “Promise, Noah. I won’t go that far again, and now I have the backup you made to keep me safe.”

Noah smiles into his plating a second before his eyes open. Mirage’s optics cycle. “We’re friends.”

Mirage gasps, ringing with mock horror. “I thought we were partners!”

Noah pushes himself up to sitting and wiggles an eyebrow. “Partners, huh?” His grip’s loose as he drags Mirage’s index servo over to kiss the tip, but he encounters no drag at all.

“Partners,” Mirage stutters. “And thanks, partner.”

The grey box in Noah’s lap seems a little less doom-and-gloom than it used to be. “‘Welcome,” Noah replies.

He really should know better by now, though, than to expect Mirage to be done with the theatrics. He’s still caught off guard when Mirage folds to the ground, stretching out on his back like a dog and resting Noah chest-down on his bumper. “Say, I’ve agreed to take things easier.... What about you?”

It’s less.... intrusive than Noah had been expecting. More accepting. Mirage’s palm is warm where it’s draped across the small of his back. “Yeah, me too.”

“I know Elena's already said this, but you don’t have to carry everyone else’s burdens, and you don’t even have to carry all of yours on your own, too. Journeys and roads are made to be shared, after all.”

Noah chuckles, the motion raising and lowering him against familiar metal. “You gonna ask me to run away with you?”

“Well, I wasn’t exactly thinking running away, more driving away before Prime notices I’m gone, but we’ve earned a vacation, haven’t we?”

From his face-down position, Noah can’t really see the stars–but he can see how they glint and reflect off Mirage’s paint, and he’d rather see them transformed any day. “I think we have. Got some leave comin’ up end of next week, if you’re willing to take Chris with us.”

Mirage hums, engine flipping over. “‘Course Chris comes along. Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Noah lets his head fall flat and stretches his arms out, lounging in a way he’s rarely done. “Say, Noah, you ever been to California? I’d love to see you do that on a beach.”

“Instead of on you?” It comes out muffled, of course, but Mirage hears him clearly enough.

“Hmm, fair point. Why not both? Both’s good.”

Noah huffs. “Sure. Don’t complain if I drool on your paint, though.”

“Oh, that’s the least I’d complain abou–”

Noah flicks a taillight.

There are plenty of things that Noah Diaz does not understand, but then there are plenty of things that Noah Diaz does understand–things like warm metal under his hands and the whir of a steady spark under his cheek.