"Permission to screech like a pterodactyl granted. It'll just make me less homesick and remind me of the era I was born in, with my tiny dinosaur hands."
As for the rest...
Peter gives him a warm smile.
"Well, maybe the difference is just that you've got someone to put Humpty Dumpty back together again."
-
It takes time to fix humpty Dumpty. Hours and hours. Peter is no Tony Stark or Hank Pym (who don't exist in his universe). He's engineered plenty of things, used to work on prosthetics, but exos are incredibly advanced. It takes an hour alone to pick all the shrapnel out of his knee, another hour to find and grasp how Cayde's nerves work, and figure out how to temporarily deactivate nerve clusters.
But as he goes, he gets faster at picking it up, learning more as he goes through observation and trial and error. Fortunately the trial and error doesn't hurt that much, because he's incredibly gentle.
And at some point, when it's easiest to bend a piece of metal the way he wants with his bare hands rather than using tools, it becomes obvious exactly how gentle. It's suddenly clear that he could snap these components like twigs if he wanted, but instead he gently teases things in and out of place, rebuilds servos with tiny tools, moves Cayde's leg around with the tiniest little gentle movements.
A few times, he tells Cayde to relax and try to rest while he makes an important piece and goes out to the larger machine shop outside the room. With the door closed, the screeching and moving machinery of the 3D printer and shop machinery is muffled enough to sleep through it if Cayde tries.
When he does this, Peter promises he won't stop watching the door from outside while he's working, and every time Peter comes back, he makes enough noise that Cayde knows it's him and not some stranger.
Bit by bit, he works it out, even though he's not a roboticist. He fixes things. A piece here, a piece there, a whole shiny metal replacement knee joint, some muscle cord he figured out how to make because of how closely it mimics real muscle.
And he doesn't stop at the knee, because there's too much else to do. That painful-looking smashed jaw, the face plates that won't slide the right way when he makes facial expressions, the crookedness of his beautiful, majestics horn.
It's always "Let me just fix one more thing, I've got nowhere better to be." He keeps cajoling him back every time he's about to call it even and dart away because there is still too much that's broken, too much that will be a liability, too much that won't let him be human.
So he talks him into letting him fix all the structural things at least. He works off broken face plates and cracked plastic. That can maybe be fixed another day. But what he can fix today is the structure. The metal of his and base plastic structure of his jaw, the flickering blue light - and flickery vision - of one of his optics, what passes for his eyebrows so he can express himself.
He also washes his face. It's under the pretense of needing it to be less grimy to be easier to fix some of his face plates. Gotta get that grit out, right?
Bit by bit, the structure and moving parts are put right, even if Peter won't make him pretty again today. The busted nerve clusters are so advanced he can't replace every little bit that's broken but he still salvages most of them. The numbness is minimal. The knee is like new. Cayde's face is his face again, albeit gouged and scraped up, without the nice cover plating and paint job. But even washing it made it look a little nicer.
The last thing is the jaw. Peter had to take it off to fix it because he had to just straight up replace the main metal piece. It took three tries at making new metal jaw pieces for him to nail it so he could have the same jawline. Then he had to snap in all the plastic bits. it's finally done.
"This'll probably be easier to put back if you sit up on the edge of the table so I can look at you straight on. It's harder reconnecting nerve clusters than it is deactivating them," Peter says, back turned as he finished up at the word table. Peter gets the jaws connectors ready to re-attach and turns around. "It's incredible how sophisticated they are. No wonder you can feel people touching the surface of your skin even on the metal parts."
no subject
As for the rest...
Peter gives him a warm smile.
"Well, maybe the difference is just that you've got someone to put Humpty Dumpty back together again."
-
It takes time to fix humpty Dumpty. Hours and hours. Peter is no Tony Stark or Hank Pym (who don't exist in his universe). He's engineered plenty of things, used to work on prosthetics, but exos are incredibly advanced. It takes an hour alone to pick all the shrapnel out of his knee, another hour to find and grasp how Cayde's nerves work, and figure out how to temporarily deactivate nerve clusters.
But as he goes, he gets faster at picking it up, learning more as he goes through observation and trial and error. Fortunately the trial and error doesn't hurt that much, because he's incredibly gentle.
And at some point, when it's easiest to bend a piece of metal the way he wants with his bare hands rather than using tools, it becomes obvious exactly how gentle. It's suddenly clear that he could snap these components like twigs if he wanted, but instead he gently teases things in and out of place, rebuilds servos with tiny tools, moves Cayde's leg around with the tiniest little gentle movements.
A few times, he tells Cayde to relax and try to rest while he makes an important piece and goes out to the larger machine shop outside the room. With the door closed, the screeching and moving machinery of the 3D printer and shop machinery is muffled enough to sleep through it if Cayde tries.
When he does this, Peter promises he won't stop watching the door from outside while he's working, and every time Peter comes back, he makes enough noise that Cayde knows it's him and not some stranger.
Bit by bit, he works it out, even though he's not a roboticist. He fixes things. A piece here, a piece there, a whole shiny metal replacement knee joint, some muscle cord he figured out how to make because of how closely it mimics real muscle.
And he doesn't stop at the knee, because there's too much else to do. That painful-looking smashed jaw, the face plates that won't slide the right way when he makes facial expressions, the crookedness of his
beautiful, majesticshorn.It's always "Let me just fix one more thing, I've got nowhere better to be." He keeps cajoling him back every time he's about to call it even and dart away because there is still too much that's broken, too much that will be a liability, too much that won't let him be human.
So he talks him into letting him fix all the structural things at least. He works off broken face plates and cracked plastic. That can maybe be fixed another day. But what he can fix today is the structure. The metal of his and base plastic structure of his jaw, the flickering blue light - and flickery vision - of one of his optics, what passes for his eyebrows so he can express himself.
He also washes his face. It's under the pretense of needing it to be less grimy to be easier to fix some of his face plates. Gotta get that grit out, right?
Bit by bit, the structure and moving parts are put right, even if Peter won't make him pretty again today. The busted nerve clusters are so advanced he can't replace every little bit that's broken but he still salvages most of them. The numbness is minimal. The knee is like new. Cayde's face is his face again, albeit gouged and scraped up, without the nice cover plating and paint job. But even washing it made it look a little nicer.
The last thing is the jaw. Peter had to take it off to fix it because he had to just straight up replace the main metal piece. It took three tries at making new metal jaw pieces for him to nail it so he could have the same jawline. Then he had to snap in all the plastic bits. it's finally done.
"This'll probably be easier to put back if you sit up on the edge of the table so I can look at you straight on. It's harder reconnecting nerve clusters than it is deactivating them," Peter says, back turned as he finished up at the word table. Peter gets the jaws connectors ready to re-attach and turns around. "It's incredible how sophisticated they are. No wonder you can feel people touching the surface of your skin even on the metal parts."