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Flimsy as it proved over millenia, there did exist a mental wall that made mechs hesitate to maim their fellows: a profound sense that a person, alive and whole, must stay that way, must be too alive and too whole to shear apart, that something must occur to stop your act of ruination. Call it innocence, or ignorance. Drift lost that hang-up a lifetime ago, ripped through it in a lurid pink/gray/soot-stained haze of perforated metal in his arms, in his sights. Agonized, howling despair like the end of days swelled, then ebbed, and in its smoldering wake stood newfound agency; the leaker cop-killer had learned - would never forget - how capable he was.
Now, disbelieving, reverent, Drift traced the edges of a new irrevocable breach.
"Not made of glass, kid," Ratchet murmured. Drift's hand crossed the inches and shocked him by arriving at Ratchet's warm breastplate.
They'd touched before. Of course they had, as friends, as strangers, in anger and in desperation. The medibay slab was a world with rules all its own, a world where of course Drift would submit to Ratchet's mechhandling; of course Ratchet would clasp his hand, cursing at him.
Here, in the intimate dark, Drift's palm slid along the thrumming bulk of him, alive and whole, that dipped and wrinkled the berth padding. He spread his digits, pressed down; Ratchet groaned, pleased, a low rumble that set Drift's struts on fire and he swung his leg up and straddled Ratchet's hips to, to reward him, to encourage- to beg him, "Do that again," but Ratchet already was and the vibration of it, Primus, slagging fuck. Drift had provoked this noise, Ratchet's full-body shiver, his little grin. Drift's fingers. Drift's thighs.
It was unreal, beyond hope, a strut-deep rush of possibility and a dizzying revelation.