Work Text:
Electra is many things. Rich, hot, powerful. Rich, hot, cool. Rich, hot, and looking a damn mess in the middle of Wrench’s makeshift workshop. They’re lying supine on their back, dented couplers unscrewed and placed next to them, entirely powered off; these days, Wrench refuses to even think about getting all up in their chassis while they’re online. Electra is bossy, loud, and prone to fits of melodrama even when Wrench is taking a welding torch to their frame. Most of the time, trying to get them to agree to be shut down – even though it’s to spare them from the pain of the soldering iron as much as it is to spare her from their whining – is about as easy as rolling through knee-deep loose sand. And yet tonight they’d hardly argued when she’d asked for permission to temporarily power them off.
Ever since that final race ended, they’ve been strange. Preoccupied. The crash, the loss, the whole thing had sent them into some uncharacteristic spiral of melancholia. It’s concerning, especially because she’s never seen them quite so rattled, and she’s not sure how to fix it.
But before she can tend to Electra’s wounded ego, she needs to tend to their actual, physical wounds. It’s what she gets paid to do. It’s her purpose. It’s what’s useful to Electra, and Wrench is nothing if not useful. So she resolves to bring up their change in attitude later, when Electra’s actually conscious and not looking like an absolute mess, and gets to work.
For all that Wrench is a repair truck, she has mixed feelings about working on Electra when they’re turned off. She knows they’ll never admit it, as proud as they are, but even with their shockingly high pain tolerance, the feeling of being taken apart and put back together again must be unpleasant. Back before she’d made them power off when fixing or maintaining them, she’d watch the discomfort on their face as she soldered metal and replaced wires, she’d hear the pained whirring of fans as she’d dug around in their chest cavity, she’d feel the involuntary sparks jumping across the main rectifier and inverter – twin metal cases holding the mechanisms allowing them to switch between AC and DC currents – as she refitted damaged parts.
That, and Electra had an unfortunate tendency to try to get up and roll away while Wrench’s hands were buried up to the wrists in their chest cavity.
And yet while she knows it’s for their own good, she hates seeing them like this. They’re entirely silent, neither barking out orders nor complaining. Even the usual soft electric hum of their motor is absent. It’s strangely upsetting; Electra is a force of nature, powerful and proud and confident, and she can’t stand seeing them helpless like this.
She clenches her fists, looking them up and down. Not even counting the internal damage that she’s sure they have – their fans had been making an awful clicking sound as they’d taken Wrench and the others back to the shed they’ve been staying in for the duration of the race – they aren’t looking good, the results of that crash with the diesel and the damn little caboose written all over their metal plating and frame. Their wheels are broken, one bogie cracked and split. She’s sure that beneath their plating, their load-bearing chassis is dented. Their whole front and right side is scorched, a pair of deep gouges stretching down their right hip. It’s not all bad, though; their arms and legs are scratched and covered in grime and grease, but seem to be in working condition. For all that they’d been complaining about not being able to hear her or the other components, she’s fairly certain that it’s a temporary issue with the hardware in their auditory processing systems, and it’ll heal on its own.
But the rest she can fix. The rest she will fix.
She goes about removing Electra’s chestplate, which is difficult because it doesn’t just unscrew the way a diesel’s would; their display has to be removed first, wires and cables disconnected one at a time, and then part of their chestplate is screwed in beneath their bulky shoulder plates, which means that those need to be removed as well, which means more disconnecting of wires, and only then can their internal mechanics be exposed. Luckily, the chestplate itself isn’t particularly damaged, only singed and in dire need of a good cleaning.
The inside of their chest cavity is another story entirely.
It’s not unfixable. Not for Wrench, at least. But their chassis is dented and there’s oil leaking from their motor case and the singed ends of loose wires hang freely and the battery isn’t even fully sitting in its tray and she can see where parts of the cases housing the main rectifier and inverter melted together and the casing for one of their motor blowers and the outside of one of their motor blowers is completely cracked open.
“Ohhhh boy. That’s not good,” says Joule from over Wrench’s shoulder, and she nearly jumps out of her plating. She’d been so absorbed by the increasing list of things she needs to fix that she hadn’t heard the dynamite truck approach.
Usually, the other components don’t feel the need to hang around while Wrench works on Electra. They’re all as uncomfortable seeing Electra powered off with their plating removed as she is. Sometimes Volta stays for a short while, just to keep her company, but never for longer than an hour. Killerwatt and Joule are never far when Electra is vulnerable like this, completely offline, eyes closed and body still, but usually they aren’t in the shed with Wrench while she maintains or fixes or upgrades. Right now, though, they’re all a little shaken up and unwilling to leave Electra’s side; their locomotive had lost and their locomotive had crashed and everything about this is awful.
Killerwatt and Volta, practically laying on each other in a scrappy little pile that under other circumstances Wrench would be itching to join, look up simultaneously as Joule speaks.
“That bad, huh?” Killerwatt isn’t the most emotional of trucks, but there’s a distressed edge to his voice that Wrench feels in her frame more than she hears the actual sound he makes. He’s exhausted; she can see it in his eyes, in the way his head droops. They’re all exhausted, really, batteries low from too much time away from the power-supplying catenaries of the tracks. The smart thing to do would be to power off in order to conserve energy, but nobody wants to do that. Not after this race. Not after this crash.
Wrench shrugs, pushing wires away and running her hands along the thick tangle of cables that stretch from Electra’s motor box down into their legs. The cables look and feel intact, which is a relief; she doesn’t like messing with these if she can avoid it. It’s easy to mess one up or connect one incorrectly and then whoops, Electra can’t move their leg.
“It’s not good,” she replies, both to Joule and to Killerwatt. “But they’ll recover. Just need to get this…” a vague gesture at the mess that is their chest cavity, “...and the wheels fixed, and I can do the rest once we get our hands on some more replacement parts.”
A soft hum from Joule. It’s uncharacteristic, how quiet she’s being. Usually she’s loud, wild, fiery, bright. But here, staring down at Electra, her voice is low and almost tentative. “How long is that gonna take?”
And that’s more like the impatient dynamite truck she knows, Wrench thinks to herself, amused despite herself.
“Not long.” She shrugs, poking and prodding at cables. “I’ll have them back in operating condition soon. Couple hours, maybe.”
The amusement slips away when she slides her hands up to Electra’s battery, knocked loose from its usual position nestled high in their chest. Some wires are still connected, while others are torn away from the battery’s casing; both main cables are intact, somehow, and that’s what’s important. She disconnects the rest of the wires from the casing, one at a time, trying to salvage most of them. And then with a displeased whirr, she grabs a socket extension, loosens the clamps holding the battery in place, and lifts the whole thing up and out of Electra’s chest.
Joule makes a high-pitched, distressed noise, and yeah, the whole back half of the battery case is melted and leaking. The whole thing’s going to have to be replaced.
“I’ve got a spare,” she says, mostly to get Joule to stop making that noise. “I came prepared.”
Were Electra awake, they’d almost certainly chastise her for saying such a thing. For implying that she’d expected them to crash, to lose. But Wrench doesn’t take chances with this sort of thing. Electra isn’t a diesel or a steam engine; they need their battery, because without it they’re pretty much just an exceptionally good-looking hunk of metal and electronics. And without Electra, the whole lot of them are pretty much stuck here in this shed until their batteries shut down, and that means rusting here until someone happens to wonder what happened to them and comes to track them down, and that would be nothing short of mortifying. Forget Electra’s pride, Wrench isn’t sure her ego would recover from that.
“I can get the spare battery, then,” Killerwatt volunteers, detangling himself from Volta. “Where did you put it?”
“Over there,” she says, waving at a pile of supplies. “I need the body filler too…”
He rolls over, a little shaky on his wheels. She can’t blame him, and really, she’d go and get it herself, but she knows how he likes to feel useful. They all do. It’s part of why they’ve all flocked to Electra, part of why they’ve devoted themselves so thoroughly to this megawatt of an engine. Electra gives them all purpose, and in turn there’s not a single one of their components that wouldn’t do just about anything for them.
“Here.” Killerwatt passes over the new battery in its fresh case, and then the body filler. The latter isn’t a perfect solution to the damage done to Electra’s plating and frame, but it’s fast and it’s easy and it’s better than nothing, and Wrench is going to be busy fixing the other half dozen things wrong with Electra anyways.
The first step in fixing them is to pop that massive dent in their side plating back out, because Wrench is pretty sure it’s digging into their main inverter, and an electric engine that can’t convert DC to AC is pretty much useless. So Wrench presses her hands against the dent, mentally counts to three, and slams all of her body weight against it. Electra’s whole body rocks, and Joule whirrs so shrilly that it’s almost a screech, but the metal creaks mostly back into place. The last time she’d fixed Electra’s plating like that had been back before she’d started powering them off while working on them. They’d shrieked with the pain of it, high-frequency and piercing, loud enough that Wrench’s ears had started ringing. The memory of it had haunted her for months. But now Electra is powered off, and they don’t feel it, and they don’t shriek, and so Wrench gets back to work.
They don’t need both motor blowers to keep them from overheating if they aren’t moving quickly, so she pulls out the cracked motor blower and sets that with the damaged battery. She’ll see if she can fix it later, but it’s not a priority unless Electra’s racing, and it’s going to be a while before they’re in any condition to do that.
Wrench wishes she had the right tools for this. She wishes she’d brought a spare motor blower as well as the spare battery. She wishes Electra had never crashed. She wishes they hadn’t entered this damn race in the first place. But it’s too late for any of that, and wishing isn’t going to fix Electra and get them back online, so with an irritated hum she narrows her eyes at the loose wires left in the area where their removed second motor blower sits. She can’t just connect them to the inverter or the other motor blower. Another whirr, a little higher pitched, and she twirls the wires together to be dealt with later. As long as they’re not sparking they won’t be a problem.
“Killerwatt,” she says. “Go grab me a torch. Oxygen-acetylene.”
She feels a tiny bit bad about treating him like some sort of transport truck, but he had just been standing there awkwardly instead of doing anything. Which also what Joule is doing, and Volta is just sitting there awkwardly instead of doing anything, but there’s a pinch to Volta’s expression and an edge to his humming that shows that his headache has either returned or never really went away in the first place, and Joule looks like she’s about thirty seconds away from powering off.
Logically, Wrench knows that they all still have hours of power left, and if she puts Electra back together then they’ll be able to take her and the other components back to the catenaries with the fresh new battery she’s going to install. But she doesn’t like seeing Joule like this, exhausted, a shadow of her usual explosive self. It makes her shift on her wheels, uncomfortable.
Killerwatt, at least, looks relieved to be doing something, and he skates back to her supplies. “You need the regulators and cylinders for that too?”
She looks up from Electra’s chest just to give him an incredulous stare. “No, Killerwatt, I’m just gonna use it with magic – yes, I need the regulator and cylinders.” Powering an oxy-acetylene torch without oxygen and acetylene. Yeah, that sounds like a great idea.
He whirrs at her, loud and irritated, but she recognizes the amused edge to its frequency, and so she just rolls her eyes and turns her attention back to Electra. The motor case is still leaking oil, which isn’t promising. The easy solution would be to just weld the whole case shut, but that’s kind of like greasing an axle when the wheels are missing, in that it solves a little problem but doesn’t do much to fix the overarching issue.
It’s just a damaged gasket, though, when she opens the motor up. That’s easy enough to replace, since gaskets are small enough that she usually has some with her. Wrench switches it out with a relieved hum as Killerwatt hunts for the torch, because while she’s confident in her ability to disassemble and reassemble Electra’s motor should she need to, that would take far longer than she’d like. She just wants this whole thing over and done with, wants Electra operational and back to normal.
Just like that, as soon as the gasket is refitted, Killerwatt is back with the torch. He’d even connected the hoses to the regulators and cylindrical tanks containing the oxygen and acetylene necessary to power it. Wrench takes it with the edge of a grateful smile, and starts cutting away at the parts of the rectifier and inverter cases which had melted together. This is all stuff she’s good at. This is something she can do. She’s useful right now.
She separates the cases, pushing them back into their respective places. Were she somewhere with access to catenaries and more tools, she’d take her time with it, sand it out and make it look pretty, but as it is she just wants Electra to be able to make it back to the tracks. Even so, with her working quickly, it takes longer than she’d like; the rectifier and inverter are important, and she really doesn’t have the proper tools for this, and it’s a slow combination of cutting away at metal and building it back up with the body filler and sanding it down into the proper shape. But eventually she sets the torch aside and goes about disconnecting it.
“Are you done?” Volta asks, which is kind of like asking Electra ‘are we there yet?’ while on the tracks. Wrench bites back her initial irritation, because she can’t actually blame him. Were someone else digging around in Electra’s chest, she’d be just as desperate to know how things were going.
“Getting there,” she says as she starts cleaning up the battery tray and terminals, keeping her voice nice and quiet so as to be mindful of his headache. “Just the battery, now, and then I’ll turn them back on.”
There’s a sort of collective relieved hum at that. She can see Joule visibly slump from out of the corner of her eyes.
“Good,” Killerwatt murmurs as Wrench sets the new battery into its tray in Electra’s chest. He rolls back over to Volta, leaning against the side of the shed. Joule is still just standing there, rolling back and forth a little on her wheels, and yeah, they’re all going to need to power off once they get Electra back online. Wrench shakes her head a little, hooking up the cables to the battery and tightening the terminals.
It’s the home stretch, now. She replaces Electra’s chestplate, shoulder plates, and display, carefully reattaching wires. Not all of their lights are going to work, she’s sure of that, and they’ll probably complain about it, but they’re going to be fine. Just the wheels are left now, with the chestplate screwed back in place, and Wrench grabs a low-power welding torch and starts working on the cracked bogie. These get damaged frequently enough that she’s pretty practiced at repairing them, heating the metal to soften it and then twisting it back into proper position. It’s easy, simple, the most straightforward thing about this whole mess. She reaches down to give the wheels a test spin as she sets the torch aside; they don’t move quite as freely as she’d like, but they move, and it’s nothing a little elbow grease won’t fix. She’ll fully replace the wheels later, when Electra’s able to give feedback about how they sit in the bogie.
One final look over Electra’s body. They still look awful, dirty and scratched, but they should be in working condition now.
“Done.” Wrench’s voice is a low, exhausted whirr, but still decidedly triumphant. “And now…”
There’s no dramatic flair in the way she turns them on, a press of buttons and the flick of a switch. Killerwatt and Volta and Joule crowd around, watching with a tense sort of apprehension. In all of Wrench’s years of being Electra’s repair truck, she’s never failed, but then again, Electra’s never lost a race either.
For a moment, there’s only the mechanical whirring of Electra’s motor starting up, and then with a little crackle of electricity their eyes open. The relief Wrench feels at the sight makes her knees go weak, and she kind of wants to lay on top of Electra and just listen to the way their fans hum. Because they’re awake, and their motor and fans sound healthy, and Wrench hadn’t failed them.
They’re still damaged. Wrench and the other components are close to falling over. That damn steam engine had stolen the race that Electra was supposed to win. But despite all of that, Electra’s grease-smudged hand is lifting to touch Wrench’s cheek, and Wrench takes the hand in both of her own and squeezes, holding it like a lifeline. Somehow, she can’t help but think that things are going to be alright.