Ep.0.5 - "New Tenants" - [Closed]

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Sideswipe beamed before assuming an extremely snotty disposition and retorting, “Psh, whatever. I can do that.”

Then promptly made a terrible face and stuck his glossa out at her, rather enjoying the versatile range of expression his facial design afforded him. Having proven that his build was, actually, alarmingly similar to humanity’s anatomic frame work, he went back to looking haughty and superior, engines humming warm with pleasure. Sideswipe was unaccustomed to a day without bickering really. He and Sunstreaker had a complex fraternal relationship built entirely on snark, assholery, and brotherly bickering punctuated with extreme violence and one murder attempt per vorn; not having his twin around to call him a moron was kind of unnatural and maddening.

It was a well-known fact among those who were assigned to a unit with the Twins – if Sunstreaker was in med-bay Sideswipe would be picking fights with every other goddamn bot on base just to stave off his bickering withdrawal. So it was entirely in line with Sideswipe’s behavioral history when he added, grinning, “And I know lots ‘bout yur culture and history, seein’ how it’s younger’n I am, I reserve th’ right ta not be impressed.”

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'Are you fucking kidding me, he has a tongue?' Or at least something that allowed him to make an awfully similar rude gesture with his face… She was frozen in such a gesture that shouted her thoughts, face an open book, brows dipped low in an expression that could only mean she was thinking 'What the fuck?!' She'd have to think of something else. Some other fake trump card for her to put way too much thought and effort into.

She'd leave her subconscious (a horrible idea) to work on it, instead refocusing the majority of her energy on the passionate argument… mostly for the sake of the friction from arguing everything he said. And if she didn't know better, she'd wager he was about the same.
"Ah, ah! But have you lived it?" Most likely, but it was shouting material, and she'd run with the direction. "You haven't lived it until you've lived it, y'know what I mean? Besides, doesn't that mean there's lots you've yet to see? You could be surprised in the future."

Just then, her subconscious pinged her with the results of its search, and she added to the end: "Plus, we've got Marvel comics. I bet Iron Man could keep up with your shiny red ass."

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“Pssssh.” The lambo-bot waved a dismissive hand. “Ironman ain’t the only ostentatious red jackass who can break th’ sound barrier. ‘Sides, Tony Stark ain’t real.” Sideswipe’s expression resolved into mock shock. “So actually, I have a monopoly on the flying red robot position! I guess that makes me a real-life super hero. Ya know, since all your comics got space aliens crash landin’ on yur little dirt ball and deciding to defend it nigh unto fuckin’ death for some reason.” He beamed down at the little human, shifting his weight so that he was reclining on his side, looking supremely unconcerned with anything, a low hum of contentment rising off his Andromeda Red chassis.

“Face it.” He propped his chin in the palm of his hand. “I’m th’ closest thing to real super hero you lot are ever gonna get. Aint got nothin’ on me.”

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She was already shaking her head before he even finished speaking, one palm up as if to shield herself from it while the other rubbed her temples. "Good GOD your ego is just stifling. I feel like I'm suffocating. Or like I need a tub of ice cream to fuckin' deal with you. No. I don't think so. I think we'd be better off putting faith in an imaginary red jackass."

Glancing up at the stack of stuff (that hadn't moved), she made a face and stood before continuing. "Better yet, take care of business myself. Probably safer." Better go ahead and clean up her mess. She reached up and out and began to climb, disassembling the ladder as if it were a giant Jenga game. Actually… She paused about half way up, peeking over her shoulder and looking down at the lounging Mr. Spiffy. "Ever play Jenga?"

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“My ego ain’t nothin’. You should see my brother when he’s fresh off a wax”

Sideswipe, entirely unfazed by Cat’s conclusion upon the size of his ego and his drive-you-to-obesity levels or irritating, sat up to follow Cat’s disassembly of the ‘ladder’. The technical term – at least in so far as Sideswipe’s fluency of human language estimated – was ‘pile of shit’ but he wasn’t going to get into a semantics debate with the human. He was getting bored when Cat truned about, the squishy features of her face contorted in a sly way that suggested she’d thought of something. One quick google search later he concluded, no, he’d never played Jenga before.

“No, but it don’t look hard.” He pulled up a few more youtube videos, running them through his HUD, then dismissing them. “Why?”

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"Becaaause…." She said, monkeying her way around to the other side as if it were a spiral stair case (it kind of was in some areas) and disappearing from Side's view for a few seconds, speaking as she went. "I need to clean this up and you look bored, so we can make a game out of it."

She didn't ask whether or not he was interested. And she figured it wouldn't matter in any case, if she mentioned there was a winner and a loser.

By her next step, she leaned out enough that her head and hair shot out from behind a box, brows shooting above the frames of her glasses and grinning cheeks pushing them up. "So Jenga, is basically just a stack of blocks about as high as you can make it. Usually wooden blocks, but, " She tapped the box lightly. "These will do. And it's about the right size for you. So the point of the game, unlimited amount of players, is to take turns plucking the blocks from the tower without it falling. The person who pulls the first block to topple the tower loses. Punishments and rewards vary."

She finished her way to the top, leaning her midsection on the very top box to look over and down at Sides. "In our case, the one who breaks the shit in these boxes has to deal with the fall out." Cleaver. Not that she'd play with any terribly valuable tools.. but she figured Cleaver would make an exception. Just this once. "So?" She plucked one of the smaller boxes from the top, fitting snuggly under her arm before she shoved it onto the cabinet shelf. "Your turn."

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“You got thrill problems,” said Sideswipe.

He levered himself with lazy grace to his pedes and surveying the stack of junk for structural integrity. It was, of course, not going to occur to the human that Sideswipe had been originally sparked as a foreman for a lower Kaon construction crew and as such had latent programs for this kind of thing. He ahdnt’, of course, accessed such data save for the rare times in battle that he was short on explosives and had to pick the best part of a building to blow to do the most damage. His original cohort would writhe now if they could see was use he was putting his programming to these days. But Jenga was as worth a task to stave off boredom as any so.

“Alright, let’s bait the medic.” Sideswipe reached experimentally for a box directly in the middle of the stack and with exceptional delicacy tugged the box from its place, the weight distribution of the boxes around it leaning inward into a key-stone box at the top. Of course this made the stack more unstable but that was the point. He looked down at the little human, frowning at her as he put the box on the appropriate shelf. “How the hell are you going to play in the later rounds? If you fuck up all this junk is gonna break your skull and then Cleaver will break my skull. I like my skull. I like it intact.”

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"Okay, okay, first, it's not junk." She called from behind the boxes, shifting with even more experimental and careful steps now that a middle box was gone. She had felt the weight shift slightly; not side to side but in the middle towards that box that now supported the arch of the very middle. It was stable. Stable enough for her weight. So she stepped off at the counter top, and surveyed her structure before continuing. "Second… Details. Don't worry about it."

She went to her knees, reaching out until she could grab one of the larger boxes. It was bent around the edges from the pressure, but loosened easily enough once she pulled it about half way… and then out completely with a protest from the bending walls of the surrounding boxes. Thank goodness the one she pulled had a light cargo of rags. She waited… still until the structure settled again. Satisfied, she stood, kicking the box back against the wall. "Just lift me up when we get there."

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Sideswipe glanced minutely over his shoulder.

“Hang on,” he said in flat, uninflected English, a language he reserved generally for getting to the point. He left the box pile, moving to check a monitor hooked into the side of the medical slab, half a dozen cursory techno-bio read-outs flicker flashing up at him and informing him in the cursory dialect of data that his brother had experienced a very minor neural-net flux. The commando’s optics flicked up, studying his twin’s unmoving face. Likely a systematic defrag, or an errant memory file triggered within the conscious suspension of Sunstreaker’s coma – his mind making a grasp at waking.

He grunted and abandoned the monitor, moving to inspect the boxes before removing one from the right hand corner of the base, leaving part of the next layer hovering free, pinned only by the weight of the boxes on top of it. He put that one away before replying, belatedly, to her. “How come Cleaver’s not puttin’ junk away herself? Making the tiny human do it doesn’t seem like her. She really getting’ that old?”

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His lack of tone, how suddenly it came, sliced through her thoughts like butter. She stepped slowly, absently towards the box she just kicked, watching Sideswipe with an unsure expression. Hopeful almost, and suspended in that moment where nothing existed, wondering if anything could happen… but then he turned away, walking back towards their Jenga pile-of-shit.

Her shoulders almost slumped, allowing herself a brief few seconds to stare at Sunny and then Sides as he spoke. She wanted to ask about it, about him, ask if he was alright almost on reflex but… seemed like a stupid question. 'They're brothers.' She told herself flatly, as if that were explanation enough. So instead, she went what seemed the best course of action-- carried on. "She doesn't make me do anything." She said, matter-of-fact as she climbed on the other side, plucking a small box that could fit under her arm (she was taking the easy road, shamelessly) on her way down to the floor. "Besides, I got most of it out, and the other stuff…Eh." She shrugged a shoulder. "It's no trouble to put it back for 'er. I'd rather her just rest than be in here working, honestly. …But can't blame 'er. I'd go stir crazy, too if I had bursts of uncontrollable crazy cleaning, reorganizing, scrub down fucking everything…" She paused, shaking herself. "Energy."

The smaller box was stacked over in what would appear to be the designated human section, standard equipment and supplies stacked neatly against that corner wall. "'Course as a fellow feminine figure, I think she should do whatever the hell she wants, at least for the next few months and more."

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Sideswipe’s head came up at that, a whirr of engine-noise and hydraulics hitting a pitch that, to a Cybertronian, would have been ‘huh’? As it was, his head tilt and brow-ridge arch probably did the trick. Cleaver, had been patching up the Twins for eons, done it for so long it was likely the no medic had a better bead on what it was that made the two of them spin through the world the way they did, the directional whirl of binary stars being mysterious to everyone but her by now. In that long, long time Sideswipe had never really see anything like the bouts of anal retentive OCD that Cat was describing.

Also, Cleaver was, at least in Sideswipe’s estimation, not really that fragging feminine by his limited grasp of human standards. Cleaver was medic-bot, she was femme, she had the bedside manner of a jackhammer, the temper of a tanker-bot, and despite all her snarling to the contrary she cared . She could bench-press him like a girder, was older than dirt, carried the history of a dead planet, her own failures. She was Cybertronian, through and through.

And yet...

“Cleaver,” said Sideswipe, dubiously.“Is feminine? Really?” He stood there really contemplating that. "Really-really?"

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Is he serious? And for a moment, almost questioned if they were on the same page... Surely.

"Uh, yeah." Her tone was flat, almost rude and, though her brow raised and head tilted in a similar way to Sideswipe, the emotion behind it.. was much different. She took the stance. The Stance, fingers together, hands outstretched, and continued on. "What, you don't think she can be Boss-Cleaver an' Mom-Cleaver at the same time? You can be badass an' feminine, ya know. Hell, you can't have one without the other, anyway!"

Hand shifted from hips to outstretched fingers to waves so rapidly it might have been she was carrying on a sub-conversation with her body language at the same time. She paused in the shadow of the box tower, looking more like a true Jenga tower now that some holes were in it. She crossed her arms under her chest, one hip jutting out as she waited. "Your turn, Spiffy."

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“Ooooh, I get it. ” Sideswipe resumed circling the precarious stack of boxes, trying to decide which of seven stable boxes he was going to pull from the mess here. “Look, Shortstack, Cleaver’s inclination toward collecting all th’ bits of broken that come floatin’ through her radius is just how she is. If ya want t’ call her addiction t’ adopting strays maternal, then I guess I get that. I knew front-liners who were part of gestalts and support cohorts with sparklings on base, once all the crèches burned and there weren’t anywhere left ta hide, nowhere safe to hide ‘em. So the parental/militant thing I get. Just didn’t get why ya were sayin’ she’s so girly. Takin’ care of family and lookin’ out fer the outcast ain’t gender specific even in yur goofy species.”

He reached for a prospective cube, gloss poking from the corner of his mouth in concentration. “Course she moms everyone who holds still long enough…”

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"No, Sides. That's not what I meant." She said, rolling her eyes and leaning over to pluck a box of height with her shoulders. A large one that took her more than a few tugs (especially with the thing beginning to groan and creak irritably) to get it loose, pausing each few to breath and get a new grip.
"Though you fucking can," She grunted, "…be a girl without being girly, damn it!" One last time, and the box came free with her stumbling back. She sighed with relief as she let it on the ground, soon straightening to turn and face the Lamborghini long enough to throw up her hands in an air of frustration. "She doesn't have ta be pink for me to see 'er as a girl-type figure."

When she kicked the box, starting for the wall, the frustrated air dropped with a roll of her eyes. "I was referring to the actual Mom-ness." What was the term? "You know? Carrying? Which is kind of a feminine thing, on Earth. Case you didn't know. Girls trademarked that one." 'Unless you're a seahorse, I guess…'

She stopped when the box was settled into place, turning to sink down on top of it for a seat… and examine Sides with a critical eye. Feminine versus masculine hardly mattered anymore, if it did at all. Her interest now was almost purely to see if they were on the same page… but…

Chin tilted, glasses sliding down her nose, eyes peeking over the top. "Sides. You do know what I'm talking about, right?"

She felt guilty creeping up from the outside, waiting to pounce and send her thoughts swarming. Wasn't hers to tell, not hers to share, and if Cleaver hadn't… She almost winced, rationalized. Could just be she'd forgotten, in everything going on… not exactly news you want to bomb someone with. 'So why do I feel like i have the bomb again?'

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Sideswipe had already started zoning out the moment the human started getting defensive about what made Cleaver girly. He was only brought out of his ignoring her when she mentioned 'carrying' which carried actual connotations even translated to Italian. Of course with out the glyphs that gave a word context, he really couldn't be sure.

Sideswipe put the box in his hand away. "If I'm pickin' through yur incredibly inaccurate language carefully enough you seem to be implying Cleaver's got a cassette?" He arched a brow. "Far as i know, she don't got one and even if she did she'd have ta be a host for that to be a close approximation of human gestation. So no, I've got no clue."