Ep1 – “Haven’t Seen You In Ages” – Closed

[Deleted]

The bridge came open about three minutes after Cleaver told him to GTFO. Sideswipe, being possessed of an inordinate amount of obnoxiousness, had decided to ignore her request that he bugger off and instead stood by the control console playing one of his holo-games. The sound and the ripple of air as the ground bridge opened was familiar as the wash of greenish white light that came with it. He didn’t move from his position. If anything he just slumped with a bit more weight against the console and contemplated, briefly, who the hell the medic was bringing through the ground bridge that needed be given such wide fucking berth.

As far as Sideswipe knew, nobody that he held personal vendetta with had taken up residence on this planet. Most of the time Sideswipe didn’t develop personal vendettas, that kind of think requiring a certain level of giving a damn, and Sideswipe wasn’t known to much give a damn about Decepticons. So in an effort to show how little he gave a damn, Sideswipe was going to occupy this damn space right here and see who the hell Cleaver was gonna bring on this base that she thought he needed to leave his brother for twelve hours so she could fix their sorry aft.

“Hey, Cleaver,” said Sideswipe. He didn’t look up from his game, but could feel the wake of murderous You-damn-punk-I’ll-kill-you rolling off her. He thumbed another series of intersecting points. High score. He grinned up at Cleaver. “Sup?”

[Deleted]

Cleaver froze before she'd fully left the vortex, systems jerking with an hydraulic crunch at the sight of the red little wise-aft reclining oh-so-casually against the control console. Her immediate thought - I'm gonna tear your fragging head off - was superceded by mounting horror at the inevitable disaster. The massive mech was only a few paces behind her, Cat's fragile form was in her hand, and like Pit was Sideswipe going to let the Decepticon who had damn near killed his brother and torn him a new one before they'd escaped.

Bypassing Sideswipe's gloating obnoxiousness on this occassion, Cleaver curled her hand to her chassis so that Cat was thoroughly cocooned and broke into a sprint towards the red mech. She couldn't open another groundbridge. Couldn't stop Megatronus from emergin in scant kliks. Couldn't really get Sideswipe far enough away to avert disaster.

It was spark-frission panic that had her shove him bodily back with her other hand, crowding his view of the open groundbridge behind her.

"Primus, frag it - GO, Sides!"

[Deleted]

Megatronus passed through the horizon of the 'bridge where the strangeness of the jungle ended and, through crowding wisps of light and energy, familiar frequencies struck his hyper-aware sensors. An energon mine. Class 3 from the feel of the electrical resonances in the unmined fuel, though largely depleted. Perfectly ordinary against the backdrop of everything he'd experienced since jerking online on a strange ship that was under attack.

He caught a glimmer of red around Cleaver's form, frowning at how far the medic had moved and the jagged edge to her field. Megatronus didn't break his pace, large pedes carrying him forward as his sensors extended to analyse who was being blocked from his view.

When Sideswipe's effortlessly recognizable EM bounced back, he pinged unthinkingly. His relief at encountering another familiar mecha was incredibly short-lived.

[Deleted]

'Oh shit.'
Catherine froze in her transport the moment Cleaver did, peeking out from her fingers. Neither horror, nor anger, nor sadness. Only 'Dear hell.'
Curled in Cleaver's palm, feeling her frame rushing towards Sideswipe, she could only observe as a bystander, and think, like watching a sport's match, that this block might only buy a few seconds. He wouldn't go. She probably wouldn't go, at least not in time.

She couldn't even begin to know what he went through, but if she imagined it, tried to…

She heard Megatron's steps through the hum of Cleaver's chassis, the ground bridge cycle down, and with slumped shoulders, thunked her head against Cleaver's chassis. 'This is about to get ugly.'

And Cleaver would likely need both hands, and focus that didn't include her. She stood in her palm from where she was, crouching on the balls of her feet and finger tips. A nonverbal cue that she was ready to be (not so gently, probably) tossed on the nearest counter, when she needed.

[Deleted]

The hologame hit the floor.

It hit the floor and Sideswipe was already past Cleaver, across the room, and slamming the pile-driver arc of a massive right-handed haymaker directly into the side of the warlord’s fragging head. The mech looked surprised. Sideswipe did register that much, but what he mostly registered was the deep red seethe of hate possessing every circuit in his body, the sound if his knuckles cracking against alloy of hard the give was godly and he didn’t stop. He hit overdrive so hard it numbed him and he didn’t feel the back hand that knocked him away. He rolled with the hit, rebounded off the floor and quarterback sacked the warlord. His flight mod ignited and he nailed the other mech into a wall at 50mph.

The rock splintered and Sideswipe’s arms burst apart, battle scythes snapping from their sub-space slots and sizzling with live current. Megatron ducked a decapitation swing, got a knee to the abdominals, punched Sideswipe so hard his optics blurred out and he staggered. World spun wildly. He shook it off and attacked again, immediately, launching a blinding series of body and face strikes. Someone was screaming at him. Sideswipe didn’t care.

He was far too busy trying to shove his electrified battle scythe through Megatron’s throat.

“EAT SLAG AND DIE, MURDERER!”

[Deleted]

Megatronus fought Sideswipe off, but not back. The punches were to stun the smaller gladiator, not truly damage him, and he soaked up more damage than he was inflicting. When the scythe crackling with charge came at his faceplates, however, he changed gear.

Blocking the strike with his forearm, and temporarily taking the blade out of the equation by having it lodged at an angle in his gauntlet, Megatronus seized the mech's shoulder and threw himself bodily forward into a roll. He came up on top, but the reprieve was short-lived as Sideswipe tore the scythe back with a spray of noxiously contaminated energon. Lashing out with one pede to the central seam, Megatronus sent Sideswipe back into and over a cluttered countertop.

The larger mech circled round, arms raised and optics narrowed as he bypassed multiple errors and alerts from this brawl and whatever had put him out on the decking of the mystery ship. "What in Primus's name are you doing, Sides?"

Sideswipe was better than he remembered - just as quick, but with less wasted energy, fewer gaps in his technique, and fueled with a spark-deep hatred that Megatronus recognized as dangerous and sincerely did not want to deal with right now. This wasn't a fight he was going to win with his bare servos, but Cleaver had disarmed him of everything but his sharpened fingers and there was nothing close enough to improvise with.

[Deleted]

Cleaver had to roll with Sideswipe's shove or risk seeing Cat crushed against her chassis, the paltry shield of her hand nothing in the face of his blind, screaming rage. On the other side of the console, she backpeddled with her optics on the fight, determined to give Cat as much distance from the mechs as she could before putting her down.

When her rotors hit the wall, and Sideswipe went flying over a counter that was waiting to be carved with Crystal Hex boards, Cleaver dropped to a crouch and put Cat on the ground. Her quad wasn't in here, slaggit, but she had legs. "Run Cat," she hissed, optics bleaching out to white with anxiety as she watched Sideswipe recover and tear back into the unarmed but lethal mech. "Get out of here and stay away."

Then she got back to her pedes and moved forward without a clue what to do. She couldn't stop them without putting herself bodily between them as the smallest intervention. Would have if the sparkling wasn't sitting like a nauseating weight in the bottom of her chassis. Even if she had tranquilisers to hand, it would take a shuttleformer's dose to put either one of them down, and she couldn't pack that into one shot.

Trapped, Cleaver settled for shouting (ineffectually) at them both.

And praying.

[Deleted]

She was on the ground quicker than she had time to think or process, but found her legs easily. She turned her head towards the noise-- couldn't see anything from this angle, not behind the console, but she could hear it, and it was louder than anything she'd heard since Moonshot's quarters. It was almost dizzying, stunning and she wanted to see to feel like she had some feeling of control.

Cleaver's voice, hissing low in her ears, was a bucket of cold water, and she was backing up to obey before she had time to check herself. "What?!"
Get out of there. Stay away.
Run.
"Cleaver, do--" She had to duck, stumble almost, feeling a shock go through the ground. Someone just got body slammed. She hated it, visibly struggled with it, but this wasn't the place. Doing more damage to Cleaver than good. "Be careful" Please. She said, voice rough but eyes almost pleading.

The second she sprinted from the console she could see everything in glimpses, pausing only when an attack was in progress and sprinting only (with a cringe) after a hit had landed. She felt numb by the time she reached the nearest exit from Control. Felt numb and hugged the wall and stopped there, Sides and Megatron both in sight.

Run

She hated it, almost hated herself for being human, and dug into the wall, out of sight, warring with herself between what she couldn't ignore and the smart thing, maybe even being the right thing. There had to be something.

It was about that time she heard stomps from behind-- slight and ghost-like and familiar…

[Deleted]

Thunderous metal-on-stone impacts and muted shouts and anger so primal it blazed right through the walls like the worst kind of bio-bomb radiaton- they were just another painful constant expected of a world at war. But those sounds- they didn't belong in a DMZ, least of all in Haven, and like a miskeyed note in the middle of an intricate chord they were wrong. Nothing else could've sent Moonshot sprinting for the control room more quickly than that- and nothing short of the end of the world could've froze him in the doorway quite so quickly.

There was no way to hold it all at a distance, no way to make it all make sense, because Cleaver was in that mad melee, and Sideswipe, and a monster of a mech he knew from one too many bad fluxes, and there was absolutely nothing he could do to stop the world as he knew it from tearing itself apart at the seams-

Anywhere but here, mech.

There was no time left to do anything but react, to lunge away and snatch up a not-well-hidden-enough Cat and run like their lives depended on it. Somehow he could very easily believe they did.

If you die in there, either of you, I'll fragging kill you, I swear-

[Deleted]

“Don’t you fucking call me that!”

Sideswipe shot forward, kicked forward by the flight mod, launching him impossibly fast before he killed the turbine, dover under the deflecting backhand aimed to slam him off course and into a wall, hitting the floor, rolling reversing back and slamming the edge of his right battle scythe into the bigger mech’s sideseam. He was shocked, actually, at that the move worked because Megatronus – eons before – had corrected that hole in his defense so the resulting roar of pain came at brutal and unexpected bit of luck to the commando and he didn’t waste a second of it. Sideswipe immediately dodged the thrown elbow Megtron threw at his head, twist the blade free. He’d dumped about a quarter of his voltage into the mech’s systems.

Why isn’t he hitting me back? Sideswipe thought briefly. He was on the defensive, his stance was wrong too. Aggro-tec flicker flashed through his brain as Sides juked and twisted, back flipping from a vicious chassis-splitting punch, kicking the offending arm away then slamming back into the other mech, hitting him up under his center of gravity so hard he felt the bigger mech come off his feet… WHAM! Back to the opposite wall. The control room was going to be cratered by the time they finished. Sideswipe shoved off him, hovering on the burn of his flight mod, arms throwing blue arcs off his scythes. He shook dust and rock from his plates, the nuclear blue of his optics burning bright through the grit as he wound back to put enough voltage into the mech to down a combiner.

Blind to the rest of the room, he hissed, “This one’s for Sunny."

[Deleted]

"No!"

Cleaver had advanced on the two mechs when it had become clear that a) they weren't paying any attention to her; b) Megatronus (and Primus help her she believed that he thought that was who he was) was loosing; and c) Sideswipe was going to kill the mech, the Decepticon Commander, currently unarmed and on the defensive, right here and now and void the DMZ.

She threw a blade up around the red mech's side, aiming for his wrist to block and deflect the blow. Missed entirely and struck the white-heat of the scythe's blade. Her systems registered a catastrophic shock body-wide a nanklik before it went dark and she dropped as a dead weight to the stone floor.

[Deleted]

“Cleaver!?”

He didn’t see her. He didn’t see her. Her arm was around his throat before he registered her, the massive weight of her dragging him down, the heat off his still active turbine no doubt searing the paint from her plating and then she grabbed his fraggin’ scythe. Horror killed his rage, subsumed and cannibalized it to dread as he felt the charge rip through her, the current conducting harmless through his exo-plating and into the grounding struts across his body and making a conduit of her. Sideswipe’s overdrive terminated instantly, the charge in his blades immediately grounded but eons too late as the medic hit the floor in a heap. She didn’t move. She didn’t move.

He hit his knees next to her instantly, grabbing her shoulder and pulling her into her back, and trying to find any sign that he hadn’t just fucking killed her because he couldn’t have just killed her. He couldn’t.

“CLEAVER?!”

[Deleted]

His medic and the only friendly face here was down. It looked serious. Serious enough that his combatant had abandoned the fight to clutch at her. Megatronus, however, was a gladiator, and did not miss an opportunity, no matter what guise it came under.

Sideswipe barely finished screaming the refrain of Cleaver's name before he'd sunk his fist square into the back of his helm. The red mech hadn't quite hit the floor when the second strike landed, accelerating the descent so that his helm cracked against the roughly hewn stone. He was prone with unlit optics when Megatronus smashed into him a third and final time, just to make sure that the other gladiator was definitely out.

Then, in the stunning quiet of the central atrium of Haven, Megatronus crouched at Cleaver's helm and ran a touch-scan through her systems. Not dead, conduit-damage system wide but nothing more than painful, and slowly rebooting.

Surveying the carnage of the scene, and critically examining Sideswipe's form with no little suspicion, Megatronus settled in to wait.

[Deleted]

Consciousness returned slowly. At first, she inhabited a world solely of pain. Then came the wondering of why everything hurt, which gave way to sheer panic when Sideswipe, Megatronus and Cat all struck the forefront of her processor at once. Using medical overrides, she bypassed the rest of her system checks and synchronisations to online her optics.

Well. The roof's still there, at least.

It hurt to move, the discharge from Sideswipe's scythe having seared through systems designed to channel away excessive charge - just not that much - and left minor mesh burns throughout her internals. Her chassis looked and felt exactly as it should for having had an active turbine pressed against her plates, and her processor hurt, but otherwise she was unharmed. The sparkling lay undisturbed in the gestation chamber, the entire manufacturing sub-system of her build isolated from just these kinds of surges.

Cleaver rolled onto her knees with a groan, forced her arms up to plant her bladetips into the ground and haul herself to her pedes, and finally looked over the unnervingly quiet scene.

Sideswipe lay unconscious but, her sensors were quick to inform her, alive on the floor, and intact aside from some impressive dents in his helm. Slightly to one side and kneeling in a small pool of sickly-coloured energon, Megatronus watched her with a hand braced to the leaking wound in his side.

"Are you alright?"

The soft, concerned query in rolling barritone startled her, because as much as it was Megatronus's mind and attitude that was speaking, it was Megatron in form and presence. The mech who'd obliterated their planet; dragged disaster and death across the universe after fleeing Cybertronians; put his hand into her side and then licked her energon off his claws.

"'m alright. Just, gimme a klik."

Cleaver dipped into her subspace pocket for as many neural suppressants as were safe to take, administering them sequentially and waiting for the haze of burning pain to abate so she could think.

[Deleted]

Safe practice was to stay still and quiet when a medic, particularly this medic, said to give them a moment. Megatronus remained motionless and attentive whilst he did so, watching Cleaver critically for evidence of further damage that he may not have detected. Finally she nodded to him and he rose fluidly to his pedes.

She indicated to his side. "Get a patch on that from the Medbay, over there. Your energon's not the usual kind, and it doesn't mix well with others. If you'd clean up whilst I take care of Sideswipe, 'd appreciate it."

Megatronus had wondered about his discolouration of his fuel, and the chemical tang of it that seemed both nauseatingly foreign and intimately natural. Before he could ask her about it, Cleaver had knelt at Sideswipe's helm and busied herself with his condition.

Answers will come, he advised himself, with a firm reminder that he was more out of place than he likely realized and had no choice but to go by Cleaver's lead.

It took a few minutes of rooting around in the Medbay for a patch kit, and he closed over the scythe wound in his side with half an optic on Sunstreaker's prone form. More questions. There was a landslide of them built up, now, and soon there'd be no stopping him from pinning Cleaver into a corner and demanding answers as to what in the Pit was going on.

Returning to the large space, where dust from the fight was just beginning to settle again, Megatronus found the medic at the controls for the groundbridge. She was keying in coordinates with a frown, Sideswipe curled on his side close to her pedes.

"What are you doing?"

Cleaver didn't look up, her expression unreadable even when the groundbridge spiralled open two dozen yards to her right. "Can't be having you two fighting again the klik he wakes up, so I'm putting the planet between you and him. Gonna examin you, fix what I can, and then... we'll, go from there."

Megatronus approached the console in quick, purposeful steps, resting one hand atop the salvaged equipment as he watched the femme tap into a cheap data-pad and magna-clamp it to the middle of Sideswipe's chassis. "You will start answering my questions, Cleaver. Starting with why one of my kin just tried to send me to the Well."

And very nearly suceeded.

Taking Sideswipe up in her arms, Cleaver cast him a look better translated by the rattling grumble through her vents. She paused long enough at the horizon of the groundbridge to ping him to wait before stepping through.

Megatronus bared his denta at the open vortex, hands clenching into solid fists at his sides, before he turned away with a snarl of disgust towards the Medbay. Solvent to clear away the mess, a handful of neural suppressants to manage her scorched lines, and then the medic was going to talk.