Flashback - "Always Too Little" - Closed

Cleaver hadn’t personally encountered Crashmaster’s handiwork before, but she’d heard enough about the physical aftermaths from an encounter with the sadistic mech to identify such intentionally agonizing and intimate wounds as coming from the Tower slagger’s hands. The disgraced medic, yet still by lightyears the best the Arena mechs had had access to, turned away from the gladiator’s stasis-locked form and locked the privacy screen across. Stabalised and unconscious, there was nothing more to do than leave his autorepairs to run until the means arrived for her to actually begin to heal the atrocious damage.

When he’d arrived three orns ago, Megatronus had put her in contact with Soundwave, and the mysterious and taciturn mech had assured her that the necessary parts and equipment were being purchased and delivered immediately. It soothed the femme to hear it, as the alternative with the supplies she had to servo would have been to strip out every neural line, install some neutral sensors to feed pain and damage back as data, and leave the battered mech completely numb around his spark. An atrocity of a repair.

How ironic, Cleaver thought as she transformed the end of one scythe-like arm into a hand to pick up a cube, that she’d failed D-16 so completely with access to everything, and it was only now with nothing that she could treat him properly. She’d have to wait for everything to be delivered down before she could begin, and would need to transport the enormously expensive goods back and forth from this repair bay with her every orn.

It was likely lucky that she was in the midst of waiting, however, because at that precise moment the front door to her clinic came crashing open. The entry way disgorged from the babble of the outside thoroughfare, two extremely gore-smeared, red and gold, blue-opticed gladiators. Sideswipe - the red one currently in one piece as opposed to hemorrhaging his internals out through his abdominal plates - was panicked. The usual easy-going longwave of his EMF had gone jagged with terror, the kind that made you mindless and stupid. His brother, the gold armored dead weight hanging off his neck, appeared to be very rapidly extinguishing.

“They rigged it!” Sideswipe shouted, too obliterated by his twin’s state to think clearly. Sunstreaker’s failing spark pulses made his own spark glow with agony. His body echoed Sunny’s. He felt the cold moving into them both. “They rigged it! Put him in a fraggin’ Tier Two match up with Primus slotting Coldstrke! Fragging smelt-eating slag suckers! That mech’s been a Tier One contender for orns! I can’t... Cleaver, Sunstreaker... he’s not...”

This was not the first time the twins had come to her, but this was easily the worst Sunstreaker had ever been. Cleaver was the only medic that knew, truly, that the two brothers were not merely a gestalt offshoot of some variety, claiming twinship for the show, but true spark splits. So she knew, in truth, that there were two dying mechs standing in her foyer, not one.

Of the same size but out-massing the mechs in sheer density, Cleaver had no trouble in taking the hemorrhaging gladiator out of his brother’s arms and laying him out on the triage-repair berth. “Torque it the frag down, Sideswipe,” she barked, field flaring command authority as she moved forward. “His spark is erratic enough without you stressing yours even more. Now cycle a vent, get me that crate of clamps and be strong for him. You’re his anchor for me - understand?”

Without looking to see if he had followed her instructions, Cleaver began the ugly job of scraping away clots of burnt and burning energon from still-weeping injuries, prioritising as her sensors locked on to his every system. Spooling out an umbilical line from her side, the medic triggered the end to spiral open into a frayed array of neural, coolant and data-conduit lines around a thick energon hose, before pressing the Tower-tech appendage into Sunstreaker’s chest cavity. The direct link shared their fuel and coolant, as well as allowing her a more immediate control of his systems as she overrode malfunctions and rerouted around leaks and sparking parts. It was a means to buy time more than anything - it wouldn’t save his life, but it would prolong it as it would Sideswipe’s.

Said red and black mechanism returned to the medical berth, setting down the indicated crate of clamps and to his credit, Sideswipe was no longer babbling as he was wont to do when in a panic. His whole neural network throbbed with every pulse off Sunstreaker’s sensor grid, an echo of agony he knew must be unbearable for his brother. His plating from the wrist rotors up was smeared in energon and transfluid and try has he might he could shake the feed back in hydraulic lines, feeding back into the endo-structure beneath his armor and causing his hands to shake.

“Sunstreaker...” Sideswipe kept well out of Cleaver’s way because he fragging knew better. She had the kind of bedside manner that, if she found it necessary, the med-bot would jam a shock lock into his back strut and leave him twitching on the floor and out of the way while she worked. He took his place on the opposite side of table, leaning against the slab and letting the image of his brother with his abdominal plates blown open really sink into and inhabit him. “Stupid... fragger... don’t die or I’ll kill you.”

The spark link between them was already wide open, Sideswipe’s systems swamped with sympathy errors, all of them encouraging him to double up, purge violently, then curl up and die. His EMF flared anxiously, syncing with difficulty to the erratic flicker of his twin’s electromagnetics. Blue optics flickered desperately to the femme across from him, knowing it wouldn’t do much good to ask while she was working but...

“Can you fix him? You can fix him right?”

Cleaver’s concentration was unwavering, processor fully tiered into different diagnostic and projective threads to deal with the scrolling list of errors and failures quickly and efficiently. Hands moving with blind, practiced ease over the clamps and the most dangerous leaks, the medic glanced up in response to the tone of Sideswipe’s desperate questions. The pair were always cocky, dangerous, and self-assured of their inability to be killed as the young were. She’d never heard the red mech sound this helpless, though - appearing in every way like the terrified youngling he was because when the being who shared your spark was dying, that was all there was in the universe. Gladiatorial reputations and ego were nowhere close to this bay.

Her answer was several minutes in coming, because callous as she could be, she was not cruel, and to lie for the sake of an assurance that could still be crushed was just that. When Sunstreaker was no longer on the verge of greying out on the berth, though he would if she disconnected the umbilical line, Cleaver met the waiting mech’s optics.

“I’ve saved him - he’ll live.” Her jaw tightened, hardened in place of her shaking her head. “But I can’t ‘fix him’, Sideswipe.”

He shook his head, clearly uncomprehending. “What do you mean you can’t fix him?” Sideswipe, who was a kind of bastard polyglot in his own right, didn’t or couldn’t make sense of the words that just came out of Cleaver’s vocalizer. They hit his audios as static, as nonsense, and meant nothing. “Of course you can fix him. You’ve fixed him dozens of times before and I got the money to pay for his repairs this time. Whatever it costs, I got it. You can’t just say you can’t fix Sunstreaker like that. It’s not funny. Don’t.”

Cleaver shook her head fractionally, features sombre, and returned her attention to the shattered frame.

Sideswipe’s optics dropped back to his brother’s unmoving face, animal desperation behind a razor thin veneer of calm. He kept himself in check through sheer survivalist necessity. “Just tell me what you need. Whatever you gotta have to get Streaker in one piece again, I’ll get it all. Just tell me what to.”

He didn’t look up from Sunstreaker as he spoke. His servos on the table were fists, metal groaning from the strain of clenching so tight that hydraulic lines whined in his forearms. He stood at the centre of his own ruined EMF, speaking with false calm, the whole complex monolith of his Kaon-mech survivor’s intellect thrown now into the task of calculating how to save his twin.

“You just have to tell me what. Okay, Cleaver?”

The medic hadn’t ceased in her ministrations, not given Sideswipe her optics but allowed him the space to vent and strike deals with Primus and the Unmaker himself if it would save Sunstreaker. She couldn’t do anything for his feelings, and did not expend energy to even attempt to soothe him with her field and harmonics, turning everything instead to what she could do. Cauterising weeping mesh that had been torn out in ragged clumps and polluted with flammables and dirty transfluid. Disconnected Sunstreaker’s limbs and non-critical systems to form a controlled bubble of life-support between his processor and spark, keeping those online with her own systems. Pulling warped transformation cogs that twitched autonomously in distress and forced sharp fractures in the skeletal frame deeper and deeper into mesh and lines alike.

Sideswipe’s raw plea did not fall on deaf audios, however, and what was worse was that Cleaver could feel that his desperate anxiety was not even remotely for his own spark extinguishing with his Twin’s. If Sunstreaker passed into the Well, Sideswipe wouldn’t want to go on, and death would be a mercy. That spark-love between aligned pairs and true spark-split twins, Cleaver reasoned, necessitated a natural and inevitable death if one half was lost.

“Basic repairs with what I have on me will keep him alive. He’s not going to die, Sideswipe,” Cleaver uttered firmly, holding the young mech’s attention without any effort. He snatched up her words, optics bright with pain, and she began to patch over Sideswipe’s fuel lines between the heavy clamps so as not to stare at them. “Eight thousand credits and I can have him functional. Walking, Primus-help-me, talking, and back getting you both into trouble and under my pedes as soon as I’ve shoved you out of my bay.”

Cleaver was no soft-shell and got paid for her work, and paid for quality parts where other medics in this tier would cut deals to buy bulk and cheap. The gladiators who came to her for repairs stayed repaired. Eight thousand credits covered parts and the cost of her labour in fuel only - Megatronus was paying for the same equipment Sunstreaker needed already for himself. But not all of it, and there was other damage that would have to go unrepaired.

A heavy ex-vent. “But he won’t fight again. He wont be ‘fixed’ like he was before. Without a major refit, his framework will shatter from the first good punch - shards of it going into everything like shrapnel from a plasma grenade, and then no one can fix that.” Satisfied with the preliminary patches, Cleaver transformed the hand of her left arm back into a blade and used it to forcefully lever and cut away the yellow mech’s pelvic armor. She gave Sideswipe a grim, humourless smile. “Probably for the best, though, that he doesn’t fight any more. Keep him safe so this doesn’t happen again.”

“No way,” said Sideswipe quietly, EMF a dim pulse of horror. She might as well have told him Sunstreaker was fragged to the spark and done for. “I can’t… Sunstreaker can’t do that. He’ll last less than a cycle before getting into it with some back alley breaker-bot or one of our rivals comes after him and I can’t fragging look after him. I can’t even look after him when he’s fully functional how am I gonna… I can’t protect him from that. This is Kaon and I can’t just…” He stopped, optics shuttered, ex-vented hard. “Sunstreaker can’t,” he reiterated like it was hard to differentiate, “can’t just stop fighting. Fighting is all we do to survive so just… what’s it gonna take to rebuild him totally? I have the credits for the basic repair right now.”

He could feel himself shaking slightly, a physical symptom of Sunstreaker’s being so near to termination. He could feel his own spark wavering in its chamber, a gravitational drag on his core, pulling him toward some quiet cold he didn’t let himself think too hard about - couldn’t afford to. More than ever, he needed to think clearly. He’d get them out of this... he had to.

“Sixty thousand.”

Cleaver didn’t flinch from the figure, met Sideswipe’s optics without apology because she’d already apologised for the unfairness of the system. It was why she was down here in the first place. She knew that there was no way the mech had access to those sorts of funds. Pit, Megatronus couldn’t without Soundwave’s generous backing. A small part of her, unprofessional and what had gotten her into trouble all that time ago, wanted to tell Sideswipe to wait because Megatronus would probably front him at least half of that. Sideswipe was either going to have to do something dangerous, awful or insane to get those credits, and she didn’t particularly want that knowledge. But no one but Soundwave (and likely Crashmaster) knew the state that Megatronus was in, and it would be some time until he was functional enough to be seen in public again.

“To put him back in the arena, that’s what it’ll cost.”

The number was a physical impact but Sideswipe didn’t move. He nodded and briefly, wildly, let a moment of pure panic and despair disseminate through his body as a physiological reaction to the fact that, instantly, he knew it was outside his abilities. He could not make that happen... or rather - a very dangerous part of his neural net coming online suddenly - he could not make it happen without doing something that would change everything. That reflex to purge again. He could not tell if it was just another sympathy error or his own response to the clutch of dread and hopelessness that gutted him to the core.

He looked at Sunstreaker, in pieces on the berth. The neon fractals of his optics flickered, dropped, then resolved into the tempered solidity of the damned. Fine, his electromagnetics seemed to say. Fine, if that’s how it has to be, fine. Frag you. Frag me. Fraggit.

“Fine. I can get you fifteen-thousand tonight. Another five thousand in two days. Do everything you can with that and I’ll... get the rest of it.” I’m so scrapped. And because Sunstreaker wasn’t awake for this, Sideswipe reached down to grip his twin’s shoulder and drew, from that, whatever physical resolve that he could. “Don’t worry, bro” The click-static slang of their code-talk. “I’ll fix this.”

“I’ve got some equipment coming in tomorrow - he’ll be awake then if you want to talk to him.” Cleaver’s optics narrowed a little, considering the other. She knew the Twins better than most - they were in here regularly, and were talkative to the extreme. The question was sudden in her processor, and obvious. “Unless you want me to keep him under until he’s ‘fixed’ so he can’t talk you out of whatever it is you’re going to do?”

Sideswipe didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, softly, “Don’t wake him up.” He looked at her. “It’s... easier.”

“Fine.”

Cleaver said it with finality, hard and flat so that the sweet lie that ‘it will all be okay’ couldn’t slip out in a flash of rampant stupidity, its sole purpose to coddle the child fighter who, until now, she had never seen as anything other than exuberant, as bright and alive as his spark twin. Even slagged up on her berths they joked, bantered, flirted and insulted at whiplash speeds. Sideswipe as he stood now, with the wrecked body of his barely-alive brother before him, was alien to her.

Sideswipe’s EMF had flattened to an unfathomable blank, his expression holding nothing but a false calm. In the wake of extreme despair, extreme panic, the spark-crush clutch of agony when his brother’s core tried to fail innumerable times from the arena to Cleaver’s shop… the red and black gladiator felt nothing now. Could not. There was not room in his spark to love his brother and worry about himself so he selected the more useful of the two and decided that everything for him was forfeit. All of if. Everything, every plate, strut, system and circuit short of his spark which was only half his – the fractal patterns in his spark moved in sequences completed only in his brother, Sunstreaker.

He knew he was going to break promises. Dozens of them made to himself and to his twin in silence and aloud. He couldn’t care. There wasn’t room in his head for thoughts of regret and the schemes he required to put his brother back together. The narrow foci of his thoughts became only a pin-point locus of suicidal desperation.

“I’ll be back soon,” he said. “I’ll fix this.”

Cleaver grunted to mutually acknowledge the promise and dismiss the young mech from her workshop. She didn’t follow him out, but she did move the moment his footfalls had faded away before locking the door as securely as if she were leaving. Looping the extended umbilical line over her arm, she slid open the privacy screen that had shielded Megatronus’s body from view and placed Sunstreaker on the neighbouring berth.

Producing a rag and solvent from a side cupboard, she roughly cleaned down the surfaces and her hands. “Primus frag it, I do not need this...”

For the next twelve hours, the yellow mech’s systems would return to critical without the support of her own,. After that, Sunstreaker’s autorepair and damage systems would have compensated and adapted to maintaining the small pocket of life she had restricted them to, and he could be disconnected. In the Tier she’d practiced at before, it would have been a simple matter of hooking him up to a support droid until a surgeon attended. Down here, it had become habitual for her to recharge in her workshop on the floor beside a ruined gladiator whilst the link was needed. Right now, though, the parts that Sideswipe would be paying for had to be ordered by her in person. The young twin was not Soundwave, and couldn’t get that sort of tech on his own authority.

There was always a way around, however, and with meticulous care, Cleaver unspooled support line from Megatronus’s body to link up with the younger gladiator’s critical systems. The enormous mech was relatively unscathed outside of his interfacing space of spark and inter-chassis neural lines - typical rape damage, and it would be no strain to maintain Sunstreaker’s life whilst she was gone topside.

Sliding the privacy screen back across, Cleaver considered it a moment before finally welding it shut for good measure. Collecting what she needed to leave with from around the workshop, she let herself out into the alley and locked the security seals into place. Any mecha who got themselves fragged tonight could wait in the doorway if they truly needed her skills, or else take their minor injury elsewhere to a medic who still had enough space left to care.