Ep1.5 - Guard - Closed

[Deleted]

Jazz had left in the small hours of the African morning, sliding cleanly into his duty shift at the Autobot base on the other side of the planet. Cleaver had remained in muzzy semi-recharge until the worst of the after-effects of the High Grade had worn off, the manufacturing processes within the gestation chamber cycling back down to slower-than-usual, before getting up herself. Then, with a degree of effort that more closely matched her manufacturing stamp than she was prepared to admit, she'd staggered to the store room.

Whilst subspacing several cubes of energon and coolant, recalibrating the sensitive energon scanner she'd been using for vorns to synch with her own sensors, and reviewing the geography of the 1000 miles radius from Haven for likely places to start, she'd composed some kind of approach to Sideswipe. They'd not spoken in almost a week beyond the minimal in passing: No change; Sunstreaker's stable; I don't know.

Physically prepared for an extended flight, Cleaver had timed her return to the Atrium to coincide with the red Twin's emergence from the Medbay. Sideswipe's morning vigil with Sunstreaker had become as predictable and steady as the dawn.

When addressed he stopped, optics sharp on the femme for her to speak. Cleaver didn't waste time.

"Jazz came by last night whilst you were out with Cat - Shadowrunner's not come back after bolting when... since before you got back. Gonna head out and scan for trace energon signals. Try to help narrow down the search now she's running dark. Long shot, but it's, something. Probably gonna be gone a cycle or two - three at the most."

The medic was keen not to pitch this like it was a favour, or inadvertantly trigger the same venemous response as had been Sideswipe's half of the last real conversation they'd had almost a week ago. Between Ironhide's confinement to the Autobot base and Jazz's mounting anxiety over Shadowrunner's prolonged absence, she really didn't have the spark for another argument.

Nothing for it but to just say it.

"Would you look after the place whilst I'm gone?"

[Deleted]

“Sure,” said Sideswipe, tone perfectly two-dimensional English. He tapped a finger against the armor on his thigh, a sharp clacking sound that bounced down the corridors. His opposite hand tugged one of his holo-games from the pocket of subspace at his lower back and he flicked it on, the blue and green lights spinning up and sheathing his arm in semi-hard light. The glow threw a sheen of neon blue into the chrome of his jaw line, softening the hard blue of his eyes. “I’ll make sure your shit don’t burn down.”

There had been exactly nothing in the last week to improve upon Sideswipe’s distemper and so it remained that the once Autobot commando was dispossessed of anything but barely civil words to work with. The continued persistence of Sunstreaker’s condition seemed to directly parallel the holding pattern of Sideswipe’s anger, prolonging and fueling the toxicity of it. The longer Sunny was down the longer he had to actually think about the fact that the Con who did it had not only been let onto base but been the sole reason that Sideswipe had been shown the door, got his comms blocked, and had to fly halfway around the world.

“Anything else you fuckin’ need, cuz I aint heard from Thing One and Two in a bit. Prolly have Moonshot stuffed in a hole or somethin’. He’s probably been quietly sobbin’ to himself while they take his stuff.”

[Deleted]

Cleaver ran a quick search on 'Thing One and Two', processed a few gifs and was quite sure Sideswipe was referring Shearwind and Stormbreaker. Not that they'd really met beyond Sideswipe's rather short introduction of them when he got back.

"If you mean the Twisters, I've not seen them much. Gave them free reign of the secondary storage room - last I checked they were building dens out of ship plating and tyres." She turned on one pede, running her optics across the Atrium in the direction of where the other inhabitants had made quarters deeper in the mine. "Moonshot's moved into his cave, best as I can tell. Cat's got plenty of fresh food and water, and her quad's fueled up if she wants to go around at a pace."

She nodded to indicate over the red mech's shoulder, her frequencies a little steadier. "All of Sunstreaker's fluids are topped up as well. Been working with a new stimulation therapy on his neural lines, but no change as yet. None of the tech he's linked up to are associated with that, though - won't run it unsupervised. I'll get an alert if anything happens, though, and 'bridge straight back."

And that covered it. She inclined her helm, pulsing quiet gratitude and a little relief. Life inside the mine had been varying degrees of terrifying in recent weeks, and this was one of the rare times now when she felt that the place was safe. Sideswipe could, and would handle any trouble that came in.

"Thank you. 'll feel better with you watching over the place."

The glyphs assocaited with 'place' did not mean the physical structure, but its inhabitants.

[Deleted]

Sideswipe jerked his head occasionally, ‘yes’ as she spoke, shrugged a couple times during the talk of Sunstreaker, said nothing when she thanked him. The hologame at his side tapped against his thigh a few time, the densemass of his armor making it a dull sound. Cleaver was talking at him. It’s what she did now: talking at him, business only and to the point because the femme was suddenly walking on glass bulbs around him. The part of him that was friends with Cleaver said it was because she was afraid she was going to hurt him. The part of him that was everything else that he was figured she was scared he was going to snarl at her again.

In all the time in Kaon, Sunny and Sides being arena mechs and part-time thugs, he couldn’t think of a time he’d ever turned the truly wide scope of his violence on her. Firstly, you didn’t ever, ever brutalize your medics. Secondly, (or at least he supposed that was the order of it) Cleaver was a friend. More than anything, Sideswipe didn’t recognize the femme politely creeping about him; he’d didn’t reconcile it with the angry old medi-bot yelling at him for losing his legs again, cracking the dull side of a blade across the top of his head. He didn’t like this new mechanism. He didn’t like it because parts of it were the comfortable construction he recalled from Kaon… and the rest was some guilty-looking Neut.

Worse, he suspected that there was no place where one drew the line between the two.

He thought about a Dairy Queen parking lot and chocolate mint ice cream on his steering wheel and the question he’d been asked: ‘Do you think it would be worth it?’ The holo-game tapped against his leg.

“Well, somebot’s gotta.” He brought the game up, optics dropping to the screen. There was a beeping whirr of a score being made. “You think Sun’s ever gonna wake up?” He didn’t look away from his game.

[Deleted]

Cleaver set her right bladetip into the ground - found a groove where she'd placed it there before. "I was a Ward Chief in Iacon. Oversaw the care of hundreds of bots - every day. All the vorns I was there, only had eleven patients with spark-splits like you and Sunny. Had a specialist consult we used to call in - old mech called Scope. He was a split-spark as well - had an intuitive understanding of them." She watched Sideswipe's game, the quickfire flashes and blips familiar and familiarly irritating. "I've got a cobbled-together knowledge from having worked on you both so long."

Something ground hard against an anterior coolant line as the sparkling was manually turned, realligning with the main channels from the manufacturing plant. The femme shifted her weight, flicked her rotors and concentrated on the continuous stream of data coming from the Medbay. "I honestly don't know what's keeping him in stasis. I've almost exhausted my diagnostics, but he's stable, not suffering any neural or processor decay, and he will wake up when I figure out what in the Pit is going on with him. And I will. Never given up on either one of you."

[Deleted]

“Maybe ‘e just dun wanna wake.”

Sideswipe did not look up from the game interaction flicking through the holo display at his hands. The three-dimensional light show of the boot-leg holo kept throwing flashes of red and green into the metal of Sideswipe’s face, sparking in the glass diaphrams of his optics. There was a complete and unnatural stillness in the commando’s face, baseline unreadable, nothing to suggest mood save the slight tension in the corners of his mouth. He didn’t look up, focused on the intersection of lines, beads of light running in four-dozen directions at once, colliding into light and numbers.

“That’s a theory right? That ya gotta wanna come outta it. Why some bots hold on forever, why some let go when they aint even hurt so bad. Maybe he just decided he’s done wit’ it. Fuckin’ through.” The thin line of his mouth pressed thinner. “Maybe you ain’t th’ one given up, femme.”

[Deleted]

It was a theory, but not one that Cleaver put a lot of stock in. Ultimately their sparks were in the hands of Primus, in her opinion. If it was a mecha's time to become one with the All Spark, then that's what would happen. Sometimes it was spark shrinking quietly down to a fading ember in recharge; others it was the utter, absolute and all-destroying despair of a spark-alligned meeting their end from a blaster.

Everything else was just negotiation.

"He'd be in the Well if he didn't want to be here. Not needed to do anything to him besides keep his systems ticking over since his repairs. That's a good sign."

When Sideswipe's face remained tensely static, his optics downdcast and twitching in spirals on the intersecting holo points, Cleaver slowly raised a blade and pressed the flat tip onto the top of the game. It interrupted the light streams, lowered his hands fractionally, and made his sharp optics look up to her.

She withdrew from the contact point, the corner of her mouth slanting in a smile. "Don't give up on him. He wouldn't give up on you. You've both been torn up bad beforeand come through it together."

[Deleted]

Sideswipe stood quiet, gaze holding hers, the game pinging irritably up at him as for ignored it for the three seconds in which he said nothing and for three seconds it was just another day in Kaon – no war, no dead, just another bad wreck in the rings and for three seconds Sideswipe could rely on anything she said because Cleaver, the Dead End medic, never lied about anything. Then three seconds was over and they were back on Earth. The backstreets of Kaon were ash and toxic radiation on the other side of the universe and Sideswipe was half his spark down and Cleaver wasn’t a Dead End medic anymore.

Possibly, she never had been and the disillusioning reality of that made Sideswipe mad.

“I aint given up on ‘im,” said the lambo-bot, tone acidic, as if the suggestion was deeply and intimately offensive to him. Blue optics flashed, walking the bright edge of hostile. “An’ you got no idea what we been through. Four million years since I last saw you an’ we weren’t sittin’ in aid posts wending patches. S’why I can’t figure why th’ stupid sissy doesn’t fuckin’ wake up already. This ain’t even the worst he’s seen.” Like his twin had made a conscious decision to nap forever just to piss him off. “Idiot,” he said, thumbing his game active again. “Fuckin’ moron.”

[Deleted]

He wasn't looking at her, zoning back into his game. Killing bits of light with other bits of light for a tinny-shriek reward and a rising counter. The femme smiled a little.

"All looks and no substance," Cleaver replied, echoing a dozen snarled refrains from the Twin whilst watching from the side whilst she shoved Sunstreaker's internals back inside. Sunny was the savage one - murderously intent, ruthlessly savage, and whilst Sideswipe could be those things, at his core he was socially cheerful.

There was no doubt in the medic's mind that if the positions had been reversed - Sideswipe unconscious for joors on end and Sunstreaker the one to be betrayed in a misguided and frightened act of securing peace - she'd be dead already.

"I've gotta go." She took a half step back and to the side, pausing to add, "see you in a few."

Then the helibot was moving towards the entrance to the Neutral base and the African air outside.


<<OOC: Fin, or to you to fin if you'd like.>>