Ep0.5 - 'Like Old Times' - Closed

Sideswipe didn’t have the energy even at full strength to resist Cleaver if she got hold of him, so he certainly didn’t have it in him now to stop the medic when she tugged him into a kind of loose hold against the sturdy heat of her shoulder. It was the first he’d moved from his spot all day, all night. He’d been seated on a crate beside Sunstreaker’s medical slab, arms folded on the table next to his brother’s immobile frame since yesterday, watching Sunstreaker’s face for any sign that the spark-glow of consciousness would come back to the dimmed-out irises of his twin’s optics. He sat there, with his end of their fraternal link laid open, calling to his twin as loudly, as desperately, as many times as he could through the empathic psionics of spark-splits. He tried to pull Sunny by the indelible quantum link between them and haul his irritable, conceited, piece of shit twin out of the dark and make him fucking talk to him.

Cleaver’s presence here, her grip on him, the offer of energon didn’t faze him in his mantra, still calling over and over again wake up, wake up, Sunstreaker, wake the hell up. His had a processor ache and his spark throbbed and his hydraulics felt a bit stuck and he didn’t care. His knee was almost completely functional know, his arm up to full functionality. The medics knew their stuff and they knew how to hold him down for repairs more than anything. Sideswipe thought, vaguely, that Sunstreaker would pitch a fucking fit if he could see what a state his finish was in, the mottled silver of patch welds not lying right, his plating dented, his color nanites faded… then he’d choke Sideswipe for looking like hot slag as well.

He hadn’t bothered to clean up much past the impromptu drag to the wash racks with Jazz. He would give anything for his twin to wake up and try to break his arm for looking ugly. For now, he let Cleaver hold him, his opposite hand still resting on the berth beside Sunny’s wrist and tried not to think about the gaps in his own thoughts and the skips in the rhythm of his spark pulse and the way a rusty prick of panic was always digging into the edge of his mind like a razor blade...

“You can’t wake him up, can you?”

“We’re NOT stayin’ here with th’ fuckin’ Autodorks,” he snapped, dropping human profanity with the practice and intensity of long use.

Sideswipe pulled away from Cleaver to drop his elbows with a loud thump on the berth beside his brother, folding his arms and glaring down at Sunstreaker’s unmoving body.Rage shot through his spark, locking his vocoder and for a moment he didn’t make another sound save the tell-tale hum and whirr of engines heating and cycling up, the squeak and groan as the metal in his palms bent under the pressure of his fists tightening. The nuclear blue glow of his optics reflected dully back from Sunstreaker’s wrecked Oro Adonis gold paintjob and it pissed him off. Everything pissed him off. His shock and numbness evaporated in a flash-fire of hatred so intense he could have purged.

“M’not gonna sit around and wait until they think I owe ‘em one. M’not fighting for the Primus-damned Prime and his slag-eating cause. It was pickin’ a side that put us on Megatron’s bad side, it was disloyalty that put us on this rock, and not ta put too fine a fuckin’ point on it, I’ll kill Velocity if she comes near me again.” A smirk, bitterly mean as any of Sunstreaker’s but his didn’t quite reach his optics like his twin’s. Sunstreaker always had the monopoly on nasty but he wasn’t here anymore so… Sideswipe laughed a little. “And if Sunny wakes up… I know he’ll make that threat look like cuddles and cotton-candy.”

“OW! WHAT THE HELL!?”

Sideswipe rubbed furiously at the back of his head where the stinging pain was throbbing rather powerfully through the whole of his fragging head. To say that Cleaver packed a wallop was an understatement. She weighed about twice as much as Sideswipe despite the fact Sides was a triple dense-mass frame and could man handle mechanoids and gladiators from Tier One heavies to scout-bot frames and that slagging hurt. He would have been more offended at her smacking him around while his twin lay comatose, but somehow imaging the grin on Sunstreaker’s face at watching his brother get wracked was… cathartic somehow.

Not that he let on…

“Well, SORRY!” he snarled, getting to his feet and jabbing a finger at the medi-bot. “I didn’t know you’d get your gears in a grind ‘cause I had some anti-Bot opinions t’go along with my decision not to fuckin’ hang around for energon fizzy drinks. Primus! Seriously?” Sideswipe made his kind of violent gesture with a half-clenched fist before growling, optics flashing and turning away from her. “And you’re a Neutral. You should know better than anyone that not choosing a side ain’t so simple, much less walkin’ away from it. I’m surprised Prime hasn’t been in here to chew me out for not reporting in, KIA status notwithstanding…”

“Oh, really?” Sides jabbed a thumb at the red sigil on his chest. “The Prime thinks I’d make a scrap Autobot? I made a scrap fuckin; Autobot savin' thousands of their lives on the frontlines for four million years when the fucking record keepers and the merchents and the high-caste fancy-sparks turned solider were too fuckin' scared to do any of the really dangerous shit!” His optics bleached neon white for a split second. “But okay. Whatever. The standards have hiked up since Sunny I last served apparently, or maybe Prime’s got a piston out of alignment about deserters but again, whatever. Sunstreaker didn’t get gutted by Megatron because he’s a primary color so obnoxious it makes your optic receptors ache, it’s because we picked a side. Their side and -!”

And I asked him to join me on that side.

Sides forgot what he meant to say next, broke off in favor of gritting his dental plating and turning back to the medical slab, moving lean two hands flat against the berth next to his twin. Cleaver knew what she was doing. Ratchet too. Medics soldiering on and soldering soldiers back into usable machines again. Other than the massive kill strike to his abdomen, his brother looked okay, scuffed up, but okay. Like he was going to come out of recharge at any minute and punch him in the optic. He curled a hand against the metal to a fist.

“We had peace and quiet,” said Sideswipe softly. His other hand he moved to Sunny’s forearm.He didn’t look at Cleaver. “It was really fucking nice… ya know?”

Sideswipe didn’t say anything for a kilk, just stared down at his brother’s face, so familiar to him he knew it better than his own because Sunstreaker’s face he saw every moment of every day. He never thought about his own face. It didn’t seem important when you were bickering with your brother about the score of the made up game you were playing, or trying not to die an ambush, or starving to death because the CAG of the supply wings dropped your fragging energon ration on the Decepticons. There were always better things to think about then yourself when you had a twin. They devoured your life and you couldn’t even be mad because they were looking at you the same way, that hateful fraternal emotion that walked that fine line between hatred and devotion every single fucking day.

I am stuck with you and you are killing me. I have to love you just to survive. You couldn’t choose to love your twin. It didn’t work like that. Which was good, Sideswipe supposed, because they would have murdered each other in the most brutal, vicious, ugly fashion possible by now if it worked any other way.

He looked up at Cleaver, the jagged heat of his EM frequencies dying down and falling into the rippling shiver of surrender, looped liberally with despair as he looked to her, because of all the mechanoids in the universe, Cleaver was one of the only ones who could comprehend how fucked they were. Him and Sunny. How the verse had nailed them to a wall and split them up the middle from the outset and she didn’t care. She just kept putting them back together. Over and over. Methodical and thankless as the rise and fall of suns and one way or another she was there, looming like a mountain, a fixed point in the suicidal trajectory of their lives.

“Course it’s gonna be you,” he said. His optics flickered. “‘S always beenyou.”