i was little, i was weak, i was perfect too
Beep. Beep. Beep.
Slick shifted, wincing in annoyance. She had woken earlier, at the sound of the front door closing- Momma, out on her morning stops. She had been drifting since, slowly falling back to sleep when suddenly-
Beep. Beep. Beep.
She felt Porter grumble behind her. “Someone shut that up.”
“Shit- sorry! Sorry!” Hydra’s voice, and she felt her brothers shift as he sat up. She cracked one eye and looked at him sleepily. He was reading something off of the display on his forearm, with a slight frown on his face. He tapped it, and suddenly the beeping stopped.
“It’s all good, go back to sleep. Sorry!”
Yeah. No chance. Slick raised herself up, until she was on her elbows. Rusty let out a slight ‘oof’ as she jostled him, and opened his eyes, also looking at Hydra.
Hydra smiled sheepishly, “just a low pressure warning. It’s not urgent. Sorry.”
“Starlight, stop apologizing, you sound like a broken record,” groaned Lumber, who had been pushed off of Hydra as he sat up, and rolled onto Hydra and Rusty’s legs in the process.
“Sorry.”
“D’ya need to take care of that?” asked Slick, ignoring Lumber’s attempt to hit Hydra with a pillow. It would have worked better, she thought, if Lumber had bothered to open his eyes before swinging. Instead, he hit Rusty.
“Ow! What did I do?”
“That wasn’t meant for you, idiot!”
“Guys!” There was Porter, finally waking up enough to try to stop the squabble. “Do you need to do this now?”
Rusty and Lumber both glanced at each other, then at Porter. “Yes.” They answered in unison- Rusty exasperated, Lumber deadpanned.
“Hydra,” said Porter, sitting up and leveling a glare at Lumber and Rusty, “Momma’s showed me your manual. If you’re getting an audio alert, that means it’s urgent enough your systems will shut down if you don’t get fluid soon. Can you stand, or should we bring you something?”
Rusty and Lumber’s focus quickly shifted from glaring back at Porter to staring wide-eyed at Hydra. Slick didn’t blame them, she was doing the same thing. She’d known that Hydra had specific care requirements, different from her own or the other freights, but ignoring warnings like that sounded…bad.
Hydra shifted under their scrutiny. “Uh- there should be some stuff in the fridge, I didn’t have time to repressurize last night. Could you grab it? I-I can’t really move.” He muttered the last party very quietly.
“O-kaaay. Lumber, Rusty- lend me a hand?”
Rusty and Lumber got up, and crawled out of the tent. Porter made to follow them, but as he did he yanked Hydra’s leg down, forcing him to fall back into the blankets. He turned to Slick, who had begun to follow after him, and pushed her back until she fell against Hydra, whose hands immediately raised to steady her.
“Wha- hey, let me help!” She complained, her words muffled by the blanket he threw over both of them.
“Nope, you’re still injured. Lie there and suffer, brat.” With that, he crawled out of the tent.
She looked at Hydra, who looked a little shocked at the attention and aggressive form of care displayed by their brothers. Well. As Dinah had said, misery loves company.
“First time?” She asked drily.
“Why are they doing this?” He asked, legitimately confused. There was a fwumph above them as Rusty removed the blanket that made up the roof of their tent, and she squinted as light streamed in through the windows of their shed.
“It’s ‘cause they care, idiot.” He stared at her, still uncomprehendingly, and she realized that to him, the affectionate name-calling and the aggressive comfort might not seem any different than how they had been treating him before. She inwardly winced, and softened.
“Hydra. It’s because they- we- care about you and don’t want you to be in trouble when we can help.”
“Oh.” He still looked confused, but that was okay. They’d get there.
“Yeah.” She paused. A question was forming that she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer to. “What would you have done if we weren’t here?”
Hydra shrugged. “It’s happened before, I would have figured it out. Usually my legs lock as a safety precaution, so I would still be able to be upright and get to the kitchen. I’m usually not laying down when it happens.” That was not reassuring.
“When you say it happened before, do you mean it's happened here?” Stars, they hadn’t been close but even she wouldn’t have just let him suffer.
“No, not here, back at the lab. Stress testing and all, you know.” He said it like it should be obvious, and in the kitchen, she saw Rusty and Lumber exchange a confused look. At least she wasn’t the only one who didn’t know what that meant. Porter, popping up from a cabinet, seemed to.
“Stress testing? Like, they did it on purpose?”
Hydra nodded, seemingly glad that someone knew what he was talking about.
“Yeah, the safety checklist before you’re track safe.” The what? “And the experiments, of course.”
Of course.” Bless Porter, he was trying so hard to stay nonchalant.
Porter came around the counter, Rusty and Lumber following behind. He held a sealed bag of glowing turquoise something, and a straw, which Hydra took with a grateful smile, propping himself up with the help of Porter to take a drink.
“What sort of experiments?” Slick was so glad Porter seemed to be taking point on this. Hydra couldn’t see it, based on where the two of them had been shoved, but Lumber had gone very still, and Rusty’s face was full of concern. Clearly even the steamer, the one who probably knew Hydra the best, didn’t know where this was going.
“How long I could go without fuel, or my movement speed in the event I was injured- like, how far I could go if I was missing some number of my wheels, or a limb was nonfunctional, or something.” He shrugged. “Sometimes they’d use different stimuli-” Slick didn’t want to know what that meant “-to test different parts of my system.”
Slick knew that some testing for prototypes was necessary, that's what prototypes were, but. This felt like it had gone further than that. Was it all necessary? Maybe some of it, testing was a normal part of the design of new train types, but some of it seemed- excessive. At Porter’s nod, Hydra continued.
“It would be stuff like submerging me in water, to check my containment unit was functioning. One time they applied electrical stimuli to make sure everything was insulated properly. That one wasn’t great, but all they said I just had to try to stay still, so.”
Oh …wow. Okay. Okay. This was really bad. This definitely went further than just scientific curiosity. Maybe scientific fanaticism. Maybe scientific cruelty. She shifted closer to him, wrapping her arms around his middle and looking at the others helplessly.
As Hydra had spoken, the others had rejoined them on the blanket pile they had created. Porter was still by Hydra, a hand on his shoulder, and Lumber was by Slick, a hand resting on her side. Rusty was further away, not touching anyone, just curled up, eyes watching Hydra. They all watched as Hydra took the last few gulps of the drink, Porter taking the bag from him once it was empty. Hydra looked marginally better already, and Slick inwardly kicked herself for not noticing how little color had been in his face.
Finally, Lumber broke the silence, clearly trying hard to match Porter’s even and nonchalant tone- it didn’t quite land.
“Hydra- what they did was wrong.”
“What? No,” he shook his head, “it had to happen. They have to make sure I’m safe, and my fuel is safe to be around. And yeah, parts of it kinda suck, but it's not all bad. It’s in the name of a greener future. I know my limits now.”
Starlight. His limits. As if having your wheels taken away from you, or your arms and legs rendered non-functional was normal. As if being electrocuted- I just had to try to stay still- was a reasonable activity. Not for the first time she wondered exactly what the conditions were that Momma had found him in- had it been like her, so bad the decision was made on the spot? Or was it gradual, over the course of several visits to the lab to review the purchase of a hydrogen tanker?
Porter took a deep breath. “Starlight above,” he muttered, “okay, let’s look at it this way. What if they took Rusty away and tried to deconstruct him? Or tried to see what would happen to Lumber if he transported steel when he’s not rated for that weight? Would that be alright?” Both Lumber and Rusty were looking at him now, Lumber reaching over to swat at him,
“Dude!”
“Porter what the fuck, have you been thinking about this?”
“Only when you piss me off.”
“Oh, so daily! He’s been thinking about this every day-”
“Hydra, answer the question.”
Hydra squirmed, and Slick felt a stab of pity for the hydrogen truck. She hated it when the others ganged up on her, too. At the same time, she was glad someone else also had to deal with it.
“It’s different with me.” He finally managed. “The tests- they’re for safety-”
“Okay, what if they took me or Slick in, and put us through the same testing you did. Would that be alright?”
Slick shivered at the thought, and held onto Hydra tighter. He was cool to the touch but not so cold it was uncomfortable- rather the chill of a light breeze, or the chill of pressing your face to a window pane. She didn’t mind it.
No!” Hydra's response was immediate and vehement, “it wouldn’t be! You don’t need it- you don’t deserve-“ he cut himself off, wide-eyed.
You don’t deserve it either, Hydra. The future isn’t supposed to be pain.” Porter, driving the point home.
They stayed that way for a while, as Hydra mulled this over. He still looked confused, and Slick couldn’t blame him- they had just sorta turned his world on its head.
Finally, Hydra said in a small voice, “why are you doing this?”
Rusty spoke up then, having gravitated to Hydra’s side, “Because we’ve been terrible siblings, and you deserve to know we love you. And you need to know that you didn’t deserve what they did to you.”
Slowly, Hydra nodded, eyes suspiciously glimmering. He didn’t totally get it yet, Slick could tell. But that was alright. They had time. They’d make him understand eventually.
The five of them stayed on the floor amidst the piles of bedding, a lone island in the trainyard, dust motes swirling in the sunlight that poured in. It was nice. Until finally, the stillness was broken.
“So, Hydra,” said Porter, with a grin, “want to hear about Slick’s unfortunate crush on a certain engine?”
Hydra smiled, and Slick groaned.