Ad infinitum
I have no one to blame but myself. Not related to any of my AUs and will never be. Ever.
Title: Ad infinitum
Genres: Crack, humour, insanity
Characters: Sunstreaker, Sideswipe
Summary: There are many tales documenting the beginning of Sunstreaker and Sideswipe’s lives. This is not one of them. Ish.
Written because I have read too many abandoned sparkling!Sunstreaker and Sideswipe that get taken in by every mech and his mechanical canine fics. And too many slut!Starscream who is always getting knocked up. The result was strange.
Entry: 1
Time jump
There were days when Sideswipe wondered why Wheeljack was still allowed to work in a lab. It didn’t seem the slightest bit logical, Prowl was allowed to berate Sideswipe about the importance of learning from one’s mistakes and yet despite the craziness that was constantly produced from Wheeljack’s lab, no one had wised up yet and shut the engineer down. Insanity, Sideswipe had decided, was the norm amongst the Autobot ranks and no one was immune.
That was why when he awoke, after Wheeljack’s latest lab explosion, to what appeared to be Cybertron in the glories of its Golden Age, it was with very little surprise. A quick ping to the planet’s data network confirmed his suspicions. They had materialised on the upper floor to a very prestigious night club in Polyhex, which fortunately had been unoccupied.
“Sunny?” he called out, slightly dazed. A grunt affirmed that his brother was in his near vicinity. “There was a Wheeljack explosion.” Another uninterested grunt came from Sunstreaker. “It blew us back to Cybertron’s Golden Age.”
That caught Sunstreaker’s attention. “It did?”
“Yep,” Sideswipe smoothly rolled off his back and onto his pedes. He located Sunstreaker on the floor a few metres away, glaring at him so Sideswipe gave his brother his most annoying smile. “We’re in the past.”
“That,” Sunstreaker said caustically, “Is rather obvious.”
A nearby holoprojector suddenly turned on and a shaky image of Perceptor appeared in front of them. “-streaker…wipe? Can…hear me?”
The yellow frontliner was on his pedes and in front of the holoimage immediately. “Yes,” he said impatiently, giving the equipment a brief diagnostic scan. The projector wasn’t malfunctioning, which meant the interference came from a weak signal, “Tell me you know how to get us back.”
Perceptor’s image brightened and solidified. “Wheeljack’s equipment malfunctioned,” he informed them, “But my analysis of the blast indicated both a temporal and spatial disruption to the space-time fabric in your immediate vicinity which means-”
“We got teleported to Cybertron’s past,” Sideswipe cut in, “We know.”
“Really?” Perceptor exclaimed excitedly, “Well, this is just amazing! And incredibly dangerous. You must be very careful with your actions so as to ensure you do not change Cybertronian history. It will take us a while to fix the equipment and even longer to lock onto your signature again. Don’t stray too far from your current location, we should be able to send you a data message to call you back once we’re ready. We might be able to bring you home tomorrow or it might take us vorns. Be very, very careful or you could risk erasing us all from existence!”
With that, the image cut out. “Somehow,” Sideswipe said, turning to his brother, “I knew he was going to say that.”
(Perceptor stepped back from the salvaged transmitter and glanced at Wheeljack glumly. “Well, the possibility that the established timeline will be erased and the universe collapses unless we manage to pull them back a few moments after they received that transmission is about 98.59588593940%.”
Wheeljack’s facemask flashed a sickly grey. “We’re all going to die.”)
The two time-displaced mechs waited approximately a joor for their rescue to occur. Then, Sideswipe was officially bored and couldn’t remain in one place anymore. “The whole of Cybertron is waiting for us out there and we’re standing here like idiots,” he decided.
“Haven’t your stupid human movies taught you anything about messing with time travel?” Sunstreaker frowned. It seemed like a monumentally stupid idea, moving away from their most likely point of rescue and running the risk of changing history. “We might go out there and accidentally set off a chain of events that prevent ourselves from ever existing.”
“But Sunny,” Sideswipe protested hotly, “Our creation date is three vorns away from now. That’s a big enough buffer zone for us to go out, do some living in the glorious past and when we get back to Earth, nothing will have changed.”
It was at this moment that Sunstreaker acknowledged that his brother had truly been inversely programmed to him. This occurred once every couple of vorns or so and then he immediately purged this realisation before the code conflict could drive him insane.
“No,” he said shortly, “That just means there are more events that we could end up changing.”
Sunstreaker hated taking responsibility of any kind, especially for Sideswipe but even he could tell that messing around in Cybertron’s past was a Bad Idea.
Sideswipe sulked unhappily beside him for several breems. Sunstreaker studiously ignored his brother. He was an idiot anyway.
“We could stop the war from ever happening!” Sideswipe wheedled.
“Or we could be the ones to cause it in the first place,” Sunstreaker retorted.
“We could provide important tactical information to the future Autobot forces so they win instead of all of us being forced off Cybertron.”
“Or the Decepticons win because the Autobot battle plans are deeply flawed and based on hypothetical situations.”
"We could find our creators and find out why they abandoned us at the orphanage!”
Sunstreaker stomped over to the door at this announcement, Sideswipe scrambled after him after a moment’s pause. “Hey!” he called excitedly as he fought to keep up with Sunstreaker’s long strides. “Are we actually going to do that?”
The yellow frontliner levelled a glare at his brother. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said flatly, “The two of us are going to stand out, who walks around with war frames at this time period apart from the Cybertronian Armed Forcers? Unless we want to find ourselves enlisted, I say we lie low and wait for rescue.”
Sideswipe blanched. When the war had started, the bulk of CAF had become Decepticons. “Okay,” he said, “We lie low and do what exactly?”
Sunstreaker narrowed his optics at his brother. “We find a place nearby that no one uses, place our frames into lockdown to conserve energon and set ourselves triggers to awake us every orn. We check if we’ve received any messages. Return to lockdown and repeat until we can go home.”
“That,” Sideswipe noted with disappointment, “Is a boring and sensible plan. We don’t need to worry about energon conservation anymore; this is the height of Cybertronian society!”
Sunstreaker counted to nine billion as he fought to control his fraying temper. It took him two astroseconds to do it. “No,” he said firmly, “Just. No.”
The two mechs came to a stop as they exited the building and took in the sights of the city. It was beautiful, untouched by energon deprivation and the ravages of war. It was also completely alien to them, they had only briefly known of peace before the war had consumed their lives.
And there wasn’t a single Autobot or Decepticon emblem insight.
“We should disable our faction modulators,” Sideswipe said as he gazed at the mechs walking past.
Sunstreaker grunted in acknowledgment and it took them a few astroseconds to access the programs. Removing their sigils felt odd and it just resonated with them that they didn’t belong to this place. It could have been home once upon a time but Sunstreaker just desperately wanted to get back to the strange little mud ball where he knew his place in the world.
Sideswipe could not stop staring. He turned and gawked openly at passing mechs, at the shops, at the glitter and glory of Cybertron past. Sunstreaker turned his gaze away, to him this was a dead city, the occupants just weren’t aware of it yet.
Entry: 2
Sunstreaker
Sunstreaker’s plan to pass time so they could get back home was a good one. It just had one minor flaw.
Sideswipe was involved.
Had he been stuck with any other Bot, the plan would have gone off without a hitch. There would be no interference to the past; no one would notice a pair of unenlisted war-frames wandering about Cybertron.
In hindsight, it was rather obvious. They had managed to find an unused warehouse close to the building they had arrived in. Several orns had passed, onlining to check if a message from Perceptor had come through to let them know they were about to be rescued. Sideswipe hadn’t raised any suggestions to go out and explore. He was behaving suspiciously well and that should have alerted Sunstreaker that something was going to go wrong.
The orn he was drawn out of recharge prematurely by the enforcers, Sideswipe was conspicuously absent.
Entry: 2
Sideswipe
Sideswipe had put up with Sunstreaker’s plan for a grand total of five orns. Then, he onlined prematurely several groons later and set off, out to soak the glory of the Cybertronian empire. Using the skills he’d acquired as a mech raised on the streets, he managed to collect a sizeable amount of credits that he then proceeded to use to get outrageously smashed at the nearest bar. War frames were very rare outside the army and that made Sideswipe exotic. Often, he managed to pick up a companion at said establishment, head over to their place and have some mind-blowing interfacing before heading back to Sunstreaker’s hidey-hole until the next time his brother onlined.
Then, he repeated the entire process again and again.
The science team hadn’t been joking when they said it could take them vorns to get home. Half a vorn had passed, with Sunstreaker becoming increasingly grumpy whenever he onlined, when Sideswipe ran into Starscream.
It was the strangest moment of his life.
Then it lead to the most horrifying moment of his life.
Entry: 3
Sideswipe
“So,” a familiar voice purred into Sideswipe’s audios one orn, “What brought a war-frame like yours into this dump?”
It was frankly downright amazing that Sideswipe didn’t leap up alarm and swiftly terminate the Seeker where he stood. However, the amount of high-grade he had consumed had sufficiently slowed his processors that all he could manage was a blank gaze at his future enemy. Two lines of processing fought themselves to bits inside his helm.
It’s Starscream! KILL HIM!
Wait. No. This is the past. I can’t kill him.
Decepticreep! DIEEEEEEE.
He isn’t attacking me. I wonder why.
KILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILL.
Can’t mess with the past.
DECEPTICOOOOOOOON!
Starscream gave Sideswipe a onceover and then a self-satisfied smirk slowly blossomed across the Seeker’s faceplates. Given that this normally occurred on a battlefield when something extremely unpleasant was about to happen to Sideswipe, something like painholyfragsomuchfraggingpain, Sideswipe’s weapon systems began to activate.
The Seeker faltered in confusion as the rest of the bar’s occupants tensed. “Woah,” he said apologetically, “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
The reality shattering weirdness of Starscream apologizing to him brought Sideswipe to his senses. This was a time where violence was such a foreign concept to mechs, where the only mechs that had battle programming were in the army. These were all civilians and they would not understand his response.
…Starscream as a civilian. That was something he had never expected to see on this little trip. The seeker that stood before him lacked weaponry, heavy armour and Starscream’s usual colours. Instead he was a plain white but still exceptional attractive flyer.
Attractive? Wait, what? How much highgrade had he had? It took a great deal of concentration but he managed to terminate that line of processing before it could get him into any trouble. He hoped.
He deactivated his weapons, “Sorry,” he said, wondering what was wrong with this world that he felt the need to apologize to freaking Starscream of all people, “Really sorry about that.”
Starscream gave a dismissive shrug, “I should know better to sneak up on a war-frame,” he said easily, “Even if it is as…pretty as yours.”
Pretty? Sideswipe was about to respond indignantly when he caught the interest in Starscream’s EM field and that smug smirk that Sideswipe had always wanted to wipe off Starscream’s faceplates.
Oh. Ohhhh.
Sunstreaker would kill him if he knew about this. Sunstreaker however was deep in recharge because he was being sensible and therefore would have no idea.
A wide grin spread across Sideswipe’s face. “Hello there,” he said, “My name is Side…Streaker.”
Okay, so, not the most original names. But he was half-overenergized out his processor. Starscream gave his frame one final glance and the smirk appeared again once more.
This would be…interesting.
Entry: 4
Sideswipe
Sideswipe could freely admit to himself that the plan was completely shot to pieces now. Starscream had always been a determined fragger but the front-liner was used to the Seeker trying to kill him. Now, however, Starscream had turned that relentless attention to pursuing him and quite frankly, all was not right with the universe.
His normal routine was constantly being interrupted by Starscream. He tried picking different bars and yet somehow he inevitably wound up at the Seeker’s place by the end of the orn. (A smarter mech would have realised that being the only war-frame in downtown Polyhex would make him relatively easy to track but Sideswipe never made the connection).
“Surely you could have better things you could be doing?” he muttered one orn when he felt the familiar EM field teasing at the edge of his.
“Of course I could Sidestreaker,” Starscream snorted dismissively. “I could be at the infrasound opera back at Vos or the crystal display galleries down in Praxus. I could be applying for more research grants and scholarships and hoping that something comes through. Or I could be slumming it in Polyhex with a deserter war-frame. Guess which one I will only have the opportunity to do once?”
Deserter? People thought he was a deserter? Oh, this was bad. This was very, very bad.
“Stop panicking,” the Seeker advised him with a bored air. “It’s unattractive and we could be doing ‘better things’ right now.”
“But I’m not a deserter,” Sideswipe hissed furiously.
“Whatever,” Starscream examined his servos with complete disinterest to Sideswipe’s increasing distress. “I figure it’s only a matter of time before the enforcers catch up with you and then, well, you’ll probably be court-martialled and then executed.”
“What?” the front-liner protested. “WHAT!”
“They’ve been closing in on you for a while now,” Starscream said, giving Sideswipe a strange look, “I know a Polyhexian enforcer, he was telling me all about it. I thought you knew, you kept changing bars.”
Sideswipe wasn’t about to let Starscream know that was because he was been avoiding him. “That’s why I’m here this orn actually,” the seeker went on when it became obvious Sideswipe wasn’t going to say anything. “Wherever you’ve been hiding out, they’ve found it now and are waiting for you there. If you need a place to stay the night…well, it’s not like you haven’t been to my apartment,” Starscream leered.
Oh. Dear. Primus. Sunstreaker was going to kill him, going to brutally murder the enforcers at the warehouse. They had never dealt with anything like a proper war-frame, not to mention their weapon technology and shielding was not as advanced as Sunstreaker’s.
“I need to get back there,” Sideswipe shot to his pedes, only to find Starscream’s arms clamp down around him.
“Easy,” the Seeker advised him, “You would be running straight into their servos.”
“You don’t understand,” the frontliner hissed, “My brother is back there in recharge and he won’t know!”
“Alright,” Starscream amended, “That might be a problem.”
Entry: 6
Sunstreaker
Sunstreaker onlined to the unexpected rough handling of his frame. His immediate impulse was to activate his weapon systems and destroy his Decepticons captors but he quickly discovered his defence systems had been overridden. His optics onlined in confusion and then took in the sight of a set of energy cuffs binding his limbs. In fact, these energy cuffs were absolutely antique; no one used them anymore because hacking them was incredibly easy.
Then he saw the enforcers. Then he realised Sideswipe was missing. His memory banks kicked in at this point, he took stock of the situation in an astrosecond, he was stuck in the past and he couldn’t obliterate any of the mechs here else he risked destroying the timeline.
There was only one thing to do.
Sunstreaker drew himself together, levelled his best Death Glare at his captors and sulked.
He endured, in silence, the mishandling of his personage all the way to the enforcers station. There, he was locked inside with one officer who asked a lot of questions about the ‘red deserter,’ a description that Sunstreaker felt was quite apt. The enforcer however was no Prowl and he maintained his silence rather easily, piecing together the situation as the questions became more pointed.
So, Sideswipe had been seen out and about downtown Polyhex. Sideswipe had been getting completely smashed and interfaced his way through most of the local population. No one had been able to identify them and they had no official records. The enforcers had come to the conclusion they were deserters because of their war-frames and had tracked Sideswipe back to the warehouse. After three joors of questioning, Sunstreaker had put together a cover story that would hopefully stop him from being executed.
And get the blame cast on his brother.
“It was his fault,” he said when there was a lull in the questions.
The enforcer assigned to him perked with interest. “The red deserter?”
Sunstreaker hesitated. He was no Sideswipe for whom lying came naturally but he had watched his brother deliver many ridiculous anecdotes that somehow sounded completely believable. The trick was to give something so utterly ridiculous that it had to be true because there was no way a sane mind would come up with it. Plus, humans loved stories like this which guaranteed that the logic driven enforcer had no choice but to believe it.
“I’m a split spark,” he said flatly. “The red mech is my twin. We were…experiments.”
The enforcer, whose identifier ping gave him the unfortunate designation Blotchy, was hooked. “Of course,” he said triumphantly, “You don’t have any records. What was purpose of these experiments?”
He could have said military weapon designs because he definitely looked it but was fairly certain it was a Bad Idea to advance the military technology of the past. “He was looking to make better soldiers by using the twin bond,” Sunstreaker said. He leant forward, “Can you imagine how devastation caused by warriors that were perfectly in sync? Able to co-ordinate attacks within a nanoklick, share visual inputs and tactical processing?”
Sunstreaker didn’t need to imagine it because his bond had been honed to such precision.
“He?” Blotchy’s optics were enormous.
“Yes,” Sunstreaker confirmed with a sage nod. Blotchy observed the odd movement in confusion and the frontliner remembered that was a human behaviour and stopped. “We knew him by the designation of…Jackwheel. I don’t know if he was working for the CAF, I think he was, or if he was doing it just because he could-”
-He could never understand the whole evil scientist thing in human stories, how they somehow managed to always have evil bases and expensive equipment, did no one think they were a bit strange? And yeah, he had thrown Wheeljack under the bus in his story but the enforcers weren’t going to figure it out and he needed a villain in this story and his choice certainly felt appropriate. Did Wheeljack even exist in this time? Probably, knowing his luck.
“-but the experiments were…wrong,” Sunstreaker finished.
“Wrong?” Blotchy was hanging on to his every word.
“They were cruel. For example, if he wanted to test how well we could use our bond to see through each other’s optics, instead of just disabling one of our sensors, he’d rip out our optics to ensure we couldn’t.”
Sunstreaker inwardly winced, he sounded bored. But to Blotchy’s audios, he sounded so completely traumatized; he couldn’t engage his emotion processing. “That’s terrible! Were you released or did you escape and how did you end up in that warehouse?”
“Half a vorn ago, we escaped from the labs using the skills we had learnt,” Sunstreaker said, “We knew Jackwheel would be looking for us so we hid. The plan was to wait for a few vorns before reintegrating into society. Someone,” the front-liner’s tone went sour, “Evidently could not wait.”
Blotchy looked worried, “We need to find your twin,” he said abruptly, “He’s in danger, Jackwheel could still be looking for him. And if he was working for CAF, then we need to put the two of you into protection.”
Sunstreaker shuttered his optics in surprise. “You won’t turn me over to them?”
“No,” Blotchy insisted fervently. “This sounds like there’s something sinister going on within their ranks,” the enforcer leant forward and stared directly into Sunstreaker’s optics. It was the crazy look. “We can’t trust anyone,” he whispered, “The enforcers might not even be exempt.”
Sunstreaker settled back to restore a decent amount of space and sanity between them. “You can’t bring him here,” he insisted. “If you find him, tell him…to keep waiting for that transmission. And that when I see him, I’m going to put my fist through his face-plate.”
Entry: 6
Sideswipe
“Oh,” Sideswipe said, watching the enforcers drag his brother away, “Oh, this is bad.”
Starscream gave a non-committal hum but didn’t release him. “What are you going to do now?”
The front-liner frowned. “Bust him out of there before he gets executed,” he answered. “You said you knew an enforcer.”
“Blotchy,” Starscream supplied.
Sideswipe paused, “Blotchy? Really?”
“Yes.”
“Do I want to know why?”
“No. No, you don’t.”
“Alright,” Sideswipe focused his attention back to the mission at hand. “He needs to be contacted. Get as much information out of him as we can without tipping him off,” he considered Starscream for a moment, was he actually going to depend on him to get Sunstreaker back? No. No, he wasn’t. “I really, really would prefer that I did this without you.”
“Oh?” Starscream challenged him.
“You could be arrested for this,” Sideswipe pointed out. The seeker’s face remained blank and unmoved. “What about your research? Your projects? You won’t be able to work on them and no institution will ever let you show your faceplates again.”
It was a low blow but he could see that he was getting through. “Fine,” Starscream grated out. “I’ll just head back to Vos then and leave you to handle all this, then?”
“Starscream,” Sideswipe said firmly, “I’m touched that you want to help, I appreciate it, I do, but you have no military training to speak and I can’t rescue…Sunswipe whilst worrying about you as well.”
And that was a statement he’d never imagined he would give in his lifetime.
Starscream’s faceplates tightened then he withdrew away from Sideswipe. “I’ll go back to Vos,” he said lowly, “But I’ll give you the passcode to my accommodation here so you have a place to lie low. I get the feeling they’ll be on the look-out for places like these.”
Entry: 7
There and back again
Arranging a rescue had been surprisingly easy. Blotchy had been delighted to help and prying out Sunstreaker’s story had almost caused Sideswipe’s processor to glitch. Sunstreaker had come up with this? And Blotchy had bought it? The enforcer was fervent in his desire to take Jackwheel down and expose the non-existent conspiracy in the CAF and Sideswipe felt a little guilty in taking advantage of the mech’s craziness.
Sunstreaker hadn’t spoken a word to any of the other enforcers and they kept him in a cell on station as they tried to ID him to no avail. Through Blotchy, the two Autobots were able to learn the security codes, the enforcers’ daily routines and the scandal between the Polyhexian ambassador and a pleasure-mech. They passed each other messages encoded with Autobot ciphers using Blotchy.
In the end, Sunstreaker simply broke his cuffs, disabled his cell and strolled out of the station after the cameras mysteriously shut off. He walked all the way to the location Sideswipe had given him and was unsurprised to see the expensively furnished apartment.
“Who did you interface with to get this place?” he said as he walked inside. “And what possessed you to call yourself Sidestreaker?”
“Speak for yourself, Sunswipe,” his brother shot back from the berth he was lounging on. “And uh, for your information, this is Starscream’s apartment. And people might call the enforcers if you beat the crap out of me.”
“Starscream,” Sunstreaker repeated flatly. “You’ve been interfacing with Starscream…whilst I’ve been sticking to the plan, not interfering with Cybertronian society and keeping myself unnoticed. Oh, and getting arrested because you can’t keep your cables to yourself. And I didn’t call myself Sunswipe, I never gave anyone my name.”
“I know and I told Blotchy that was your name,” Sideswipe said unrepentantly, secure in the knowledge that he was safe because Sunstreaker had no desire to get them both arrested, “And Starsceam.”
Sunstreaker exvented roughly before pushing past his brother to the washracks. “I’m going to kill you when we get home,” he said calmly. “I do hope you know that.”
Entry: 8
A Small Problem
They had been spent a grand total of five orns at Starscream’s apartment when they realised they had Big Problems.
It started with Sideswipe.
“Your energon intake has doubled,” Sunstreaker observed with great annoyance. He prodded his brother with a suspicious finger. “Why?”
Sideswipe shrugged helplessly. “I can’t keep my levels up,” he admitted, “I’m not sure why but it’s not exactly like I can go see a medic about it.”
Sunstreaker narrowed his optics at his brother. “You have self-diagnostics,” he said coldly. “What are they telling you?”
His brother squirmed uncomfortably and muttered something quietly. Sunstreaker stepped closer, violence bleeding into his field.
“I’m sparked,” Sideswipe muttered reluctantly.
Sunstreaker stopped.
Sunstreaker stared.
Then he turned away and said, “I can’t handle this, I am turning myself in.”
Entry: 9
Sunstreaker
Somehow, Sunstreaker made it into the CAF.
It may have had something to do with Blotchy. Or not. Sunstreaker didn’t really like thinking back on the events that had got him to this point. Serving with future Decepticons was far more preferable than dealing with Sideswipe’s situation. He probably shouldn’t have abandoned Sideswipe given his condition but he just couldn’t handle it anymore. Staying in his brother’s company would have lead to violence and punching and possibly losing the new sparks.
He had a very, very nasty suspicion anyway about what was to come.
Entry: 9
Sideswipe
Sideswipe hated his self-diagnostics and had a feeling that Sunstreaker had already foreseen this. The timing was certainly about right after all.
He was sparked.
With twins.
Something about this whole thing was terribly, terribly wrong.
Entry: 10
Sideswipe
The timing was absolutely correct.
Something was completely wrong with the reality but somehow the universe went on existing.
Sunstreaker was never going to forgive him for this.
Sideswipe gazed down at the two new mechs he had made and tried to keep himself from purging. He could remember being that small, could remember living in that exact frame.
This was so. Freaking. Wrong.
“Something’s strange about this one,” the ‘medic’ that had performed the spark extraction said. They were in a street clinic in Polyhex where no questions were asked about the patients. “His spark frequencies are exactly the same as yours.”
“Yeah,” Sideswipe said vacantly, “Funny that.”
The ‘medic’ arched an optic at him. “That doesn’t happen normally. Normally, it’s not my place to ask questions but spark cloning-”
“Would you believe I’m temporally challenged?” Sideswipe interrupted.
He felt the medic send a high frequency transmission and knew the enforcers had been called. Cursing wildly to himself, he grabbed his two new sparks and escaped out onto the streets. He debated what to do with them; he couldn’t keep them because he was going to return to his own time soon. He couldn’t let Starscream know because the Seeker was off-planet for his research. There was only one thing to do. He began the arduous journey to Iacon and left them in an orphanage there because that’s where he could recall growing up.
Karma, he was certain, was laughing at him.
He tracked down his brother’s comm frequency and sent him a message. It’s done. Sunstreaker got himself honourably discharged from service and returned to Starscream’s apartment.
“I hate you,” Sunstreaker informed him bluntly, standing in the doorway.
“Join the freaking club,” Sideswipe replied numbly.
“I was happier not knowing who my creators were. Seriously.”
“I am never going to be able to look at Starscream the same way again.”
“I am never going to be able to look at you the same way again.”
Sideswipe deflated onto his berth. “I hate Wheeljack.”
Sunstreaker gave a harsh laugh. “Sideswipe, this was all on you.”
Of course, it was around that time that Perceptor finally got a lock onto their signature and called them home. The twins both agreed it was something they would never speak of and then Sunstreaker promptly disassembled his brother upon arriving in the proper time.
The Autobot forces were extremely perplexed that Sideswipe helped him accomplish this task.
Addendum:
The newly onlined twins remained in the orphanage for five vorns before being forced out due to a reduction in energon availability. Had the two Autobot warriors never arrived, the orphanage would have been able to afford the energon prices. Sideswipe’s binges had drained a sizeable amount of energon.
Starscream returned from his research and lost his partner on a small, uninhabited planet.
Blotchy eventually put things together and realised that there was a mech called Wheeljack. The young engineer mech was put on trial for illegal experimentation but the case never made it through given the two witnesses involved had vanished and there was no actual physical evidence. Blotchy’s tendency to see conspiracies grew after his case was rejected. He became increasingly paranoid, eventually changed his name to Red Alert and joined the Autobot forces when the war broke out.
However, Wheeljack’s studies were sufficiently disrupted that he never made it through the academy and became a qualified engineer. The deficiencies in his studies meant that occasional mistakes were made in his inventions. One such mistake resulted in an explosion that sent Sunstreaker and Sideswipe back in time, thus setting off a chain of reactions that would lead to that explosion. The timelines had never been in any danger.
Everything was as it was supposed to be.
End
Table of contents
Title: Ad infinitum
Genres: Crack, humour, insanity
Characters: Sunstreaker, Sideswipe
Summary: There are many tales documenting the beginning of Sunstreaker and Sideswipe’s lives. This is not one of them. Ish.
Written because I have read too many abandoned sparkling!Sunstreaker and Sideswipe that get taken in by every mech and his mechanical canine fics. And too many slut!Starscream who is always getting knocked up. The result was strange.
Entry: 1
Time jump
There were days when Sideswipe wondered why Wheeljack was still allowed to work in a lab. It didn’t seem the slightest bit logical, Prowl was allowed to berate Sideswipe about the importance of learning from one’s mistakes and yet despite the craziness that was constantly produced from Wheeljack’s lab, no one had wised up yet and shut the engineer down. Insanity, Sideswipe had decided, was the norm amongst the Autobot ranks and no one was immune.
That was why when he awoke, after Wheeljack’s latest lab explosion, to what appeared to be Cybertron in the glories of its Golden Age, it was with very little surprise. A quick ping to the planet’s data network confirmed his suspicions. They had materialised on the upper floor to a very prestigious night club in Polyhex, which fortunately had been unoccupied.
“Sunny?” he called out, slightly dazed. A grunt affirmed that his brother was in his near vicinity. “There was a Wheeljack explosion.” Another uninterested grunt came from Sunstreaker. “It blew us back to Cybertron’s Golden Age.”
That caught Sunstreaker’s attention. “It did?”
“Yep,” Sideswipe smoothly rolled off his back and onto his pedes. He located Sunstreaker on the floor a few metres away, glaring at him so Sideswipe gave his brother his most annoying smile. “We’re in the past.”
“That,” Sunstreaker said caustically, “Is rather obvious.”
A nearby holoprojector suddenly turned on and a shaky image of Perceptor appeared in front of them. “-streaker…wipe? Can…hear me?”
The yellow frontliner was on his pedes and in front of the holoimage immediately. “Yes,” he said impatiently, giving the equipment a brief diagnostic scan. The projector wasn’t malfunctioning, which meant the interference came from a weak signal, “Tell me you know how to get us back.”
Perceptor’s image brightened and solidified. “Wheeljack’s equipment malfunctioned,” he informed them, “But my analysis of the blast indicated both a temporal and spatial disruption to the space-time fabric in your immediate vicinity which means-”
“We got teleported to Cybertron’s past,” Sideswipe cut in, “We know.”
“Really?” Perceptor exclaimed excitedly, “Well, this is just amazing! And incredibly dangerous. You must be very careful with your actions so as to ensure you do not change Cybertronian history. It will take us a while to fix the equipment and even longer to lock onto your signature again. Don’t stray too far from your current location, we should be able to send you a data message to call you back once we’re ready. We might be able to bring you home tomorrow or it might take us vorns. Be very, very careful or you could risk erasing us all from existence!”
With that, the image cut out. “Somehow,” Sideswipe said, turning to his brother, “I knew he was going to say that.”
(Perceptor stepped back from the salvaged transmitter and glanced at Wheeljack glumly. “Well, the possibility that the established timeline will be erased and the universe collapses unless we manage to pull them back a few moments after they received that transmission is about 98.59588593940%.”
Wheeljack’s facemask flashed a sickly grey. “We’re all going to die.”)
The two time-displaced mechs waited approximately a joor for their rescue to occur. Then, Sideswipe was officially bored and couldn’t remain in one place anymore. “The whole of Cybertron is waiting for us out there and we’re standing here like idiots,” he decided.
“Haven’t your stupid human movies taught you anything about messing with time travel?” Sunstreaker frowned. It seemed like a monumentally stupid idea, moving away from their most likely point of rescue and running the risk of changing history. “We might go out there and accidentally set off a chain of events that prevent ourselves from ever existing.”
“But Sunny,” Sideswipe protested hotly, “Our creation date is three vorns away from now. That’s a big enough buffer zone for us to go out, do some living in the glorious past and when we get back to Earth, nothing will have changed.”
It was at this moment that Sunstreaker acknowledged that his brother had truly been inversely programmed to him. This occurred once every couple of vorns or so and then he immediately purged this realisation before the code conflict could drive him insane.
“No,” he said shortly, “That just means there are more events that we could end up changing.”
Sunstreaker hated taking responsibility of any kind, especially for Sideswipe but even he could tell that messing around in Cybertron’s past was a Bad Idea.
Sideswipe sulked unhappily beside him for several breems. Sunstreaker studiously ignored his brother. He was an idiot anyway.
“We could stop the war from ever happening!” Sideswipe wheedled.
“Or we could be the ones to cause it in the first place,” Sunstreaker retorted.
“We could provide important tactical information to the future Autobot forces so they win instead of all of us being forced off Cybertron.”
“Or the Decepticons win because the Autobot battle plans are deeply flawed and based on hypothetical situations.”
"We could find our creators and find out why they abandoned us at the orphanage!”
Sunstreaker stomped over to the door at this announcement, Sideswipe scrambled after him after a moment’s pause. “Hey!” he called excitedly as he fought to keep up with Sunstreaker’s long strides. “Are we actually going to do that?”
The yellow frontliner levelled a glare at his brother. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said flatly, “The two of us are going to stand out, who walks around with war frames at this time period apart from the Cybertronian Armed Forcers? Unless we want to find ourselves enlisted, I say we lie low and wait for rescue.”
Sideswipe blanched. When the war had started, the bulk of CAF had become Decepticons. “Okay,” he said, “We lie low and do what exactly?”
Sunstreaker narrowed his optics at his brother. “We find a place nearby that no one uses, place our frames into lockdown to conserve energon and set ourselves triggers to awake us every orn. We check if we’ve received any messages. Return to lockdown and repeat until we can go home.”
“That,” Sideswipe noted with disappointment, “Is a boring and sensible plan. We don’t need to worry about energon conservation anymore; this is the height of Cybertronian society!”
Sunstreaker counted to nine billion as he fought to control his fraying temper. It took him two astroseconds to do it. “No,” he said firmly, “Just. No.”
The two mechs came to a stop as they exited the building and took in the sights of the city. It was beautiful, untouched by energon deprivation and the ravages of war. It was also completely alien to them, they had only briefly known of peace before the war had consumed their lives.
And there wasn’t a single Autobot or Decepticon emblem insight.
“We should disable our faction modulators,” Sideswipe said as he gazed at the mechs walking past.
Sunstreaker grunted in acknowledgment and it took them a few astroseconds to access the programs. Removing their sigils felt odd and it just resonated with them that they didn’t belong to this place. It could have been home once upon a time but Sunstreaker just desperately wanted to get back to the strange little mud ball where he knew his place in the world.
Sideswipe could not stop staring. He turned and gawked openly at passing mechs, at the shops, at the glitter and glory of Cybertron past. Sunstreaker turned his gaze away, to him this was a dead city, the occupants just weren’t aware of it yet.
Entry: 2
Sunstreaker
Sunstreaker’s plan to pass time so they could get back home was a good one. It just had one minor flaw.
Sideswipe was involved.
Had he been stuck with any other Bot, the plan would have gone off without a hitch. There would be no interference to the past; no one would notice a pair of unenlisted war-frames wandering about Cybertron.
In hindsight, it was rather obvious. They had managed to find an unused warehouse close to the building they had arrived in. Several orns had passed, onlining to check if a message from Perceptor had come through to let them know they were about to be rescued. Sideswipe hadn’t raised any suggestions to go out and explore. He was behaving suspiciously well and that should have alerted Sunstreaker that something was going to go wrong.
The orn he was drawn out of recharge prematurely by the enforcers, Sideswipe was conspicuously absent.
Entry: 2
Sideswipe
Sideswipe had put up with Sunstreaker’s plan for a grand total of five orns. Then, he onlined prematurely several groons later and set off, out to soak the glory of the Cybertronian empire. Using the skills he’d acquired as a mech raised on the streets, he managed to collect a sizeable amount of credits that he then proceeded to use to get outrageously smashed at the nearest bar. War frames were very rare outside the army and that made Sideswipe exotic. Often, he managed to pick up a companion at said establishment, head over to their place and have some mind-blowing interfacing before heading back to Sunstreaker’s hidey-hole until the next time his brother onlined.
Then, he repeated the entire process again and again.
The science team hadn’t been joking when they said it could take them vorns to get home. Half a vorn had passed, with Sunstreaker becoming increasingly grumpy whenever he onlined, when Sideswipe ran into Starscream.
It was the strangest moment of his life.
Then it lead to the most horrifying moment of his life.
Entry: 3
Sideswipe
“So,” a familiar voice purred into Sideswipe’s audios one orn, “What brought a war-frame like yours into this dump?”
It was frankly downright amazing that Sideswipe didn’t leap up alarm and swiftly terminate the Seeker where he stood. However, the amount of high-grade he had consumed had sufficiently slowed his processors that all he could manage was a blank gaze at his future enemy. Two lines of processing fought themselves to bits inside his helm.
It’s Starscream! KILL HIM!
Wait. No. This is the past. I can’t kill him.
Decepticreep! DIEEEEEEE.
He isn’t attacking me. I wonder why.
KILLKILLKILLKILLKILLKILL.
Can’t mess with the past.
DECEPTICOOOOOOOON!
Starscream gave Sideswipe a onceover and then a self-satisfied smirk slowly blossomed across the Seeker’s faceplates. Given that this normally occurred on a battlefield when something extremely unpleasant was about to happen to Sideswipe, something like painholyfragsomuchfraggingpain, Sideswipe’s weapon systems began to activate.
The Seeker faltered in confusion as the rest of the bar’s occupants tensed. “Woah,” he said apologetically, “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
The reality shattering weirdness of Starscream apologizing to him brought Sideswipe to his senses. This was a time where violence was such a foreign concept to mechs, where the only mechs that had battle programming were in the army. These were all civilians and they would not understand his response.
…Starscream as a civilian. That was something he had never expected to see on this little trip. The seeker that stood before him lacked weaponry, heavy armour and Starscream’s usual colours. Instead he was a plain white but still exceptional attractive flyer.
Attractive? Wait, what? How much highgrade had he had? It took a great deal of concentration but he managed to terminate that line of processing before it could get him into any trouble. He hoped.
He deactivated his weapons, “Sorry,” he said, wondering what was wrong with this world that he felt the need to apologize to freaking Starscream of all people, “Really sorry about that.”
Starscream gave a dismissive shrug, “I should know better to sneak up on a war-frame,” he said easily, “Even if it is as…pretty as yours.”
Pretty? Sideswipe was about to respond indignantly when he caught the interest in Starscream’s EM field and that smug smirk that Sideswipe had always wanted to wipe off Starscream’s faceplates.
Oh. Ohhhh.
Sunstreaker would kill him if he knew about this. Sunstreaker however was deep in recharge because he was being sensible and therefore would have no idea.
A wide grin spread across Sideswipe’s face. “Hello there,” he said, “My name is Side…Streaker.”
Okay, so, not the most original names. But he was half-overenergized out his processor. Starscream gave his frame one final glance and the smirk appeared again once more.
This would be…interesting.
Entry: 4
Sideswipe
Sideswipe could freely admit to himself that the plan was completely shot to pieces now. Starscream had always been a determined fragger but the front-liner was used to the Seeker trying to kill him. Now, however, Starscream had turned that relentless attention to pursuing him and quite frankly, all was not right with the universe.
His normal routine was constantly being interrupted by Starscream. He tried picking different bars and yet somehow he inevitably wound up at the Seeker’s place by the end of the orn. (A smarter mech would have realised that being the only war-frame in downtown Polyhex would make him relatively easy to track but Sideswipe never made the connection).
“Surely you could have better things you could be doing?” he muttered one orn when he felt the familiar EM field teasing at the edge of his.
“Of course I could Sidestreaker,” Starscream snorted dismissively. “I could be at the infrasound opera back at Vos or the crystal display galleries down in Praxus. I could be applying for more research grants and scholarships and hoping that something comes through. Or I could be slumming it in Polyhex with a deserter war-frame. Guess which one I will only have the opportunity to do once?”
Deserter? People thought he was a deserter? Oh, this was bad. This was very, very bad.
“Stop panicking,” the Seeker advised him with a bored air. “It’s unattractive and we could be doing ‘better things’ right now.”
“But I’m not a deserter,” Sideswipe hissed furiously.
“Whatever,” Starscream examined his servos with complete disinterest to Sideswipe’s increasing distress. “I figure it’s only a matter of time before the enforcers catch up with you and then, well, you’ll probably be court-martialled and then executed.”
“What?” the front-liner protested. “WHAT!”
“They’ve been closing in on you for a while now,” Starscream said, giving Sideswipe a strange look, “I know a Polyhexian enforcer, he was telling me all about it. I thought you knew, you kept changing bars.”
Sideswipe wasn’t about to let Starscream know that was because he was been avoiding him. “That’s why I’m here this orn actually,” the seeker went on when it became obvious Sideswipe wasn’t going to say anything. “Wherever you’ve been hiding out, they’ve found it now and are waiting for you there. If you need a place to stay the night…well, it’s not like you haven’t been to my apartment,” Starscream leered.
Oh. Dear. Primus. Sunstreaker was going to kill him, going to brutally murder the enforcers at the warehouse. They had never dealt with anything like a proper war-frame, not to mention their weapon technology and shielding was not as advanced as Sunstreaker’s.
“I need to get back there,” Sideswipe shot to his pedes, only to find Starscream’s arms clamp down around him.
“Easy,” the Seeker advised him, “You would be running straight into their servos.”
“You don’t understand,” the frontliner hissed, “My brother is back there in recharge and he won’t know!”
“Alright,” Starscream amended, “That might be a problem.”
Entry: 6
Sunstreaker
Sunstreaker onlined to the unexpected rough handling of his frame. His immediate impulse was to activate his weapon systems and destroy his Decepticons captors but he quickly discovered his defence systems had been overridden. His optics onlined in confusion and then took in the sight of a set of energy cuffs binding his limbs. In fact, these energy cuffs were absolutely antique; no one used them anymore because hacking them was incredibly easy.
Then he saw the enforcers. Then he realised Sideswipe was missing. His memory banks kicked in at this point, he took stock of the situation in an astrosecond, he was stuck in the past and he couldn’t obliterate any of the mechs here else he risked destroying the timeline.
There was only one thing to do.
Sunstreaker drew himself together, levelled his best Death Glare at his captors and sulked.
He endured, in silence, the mishandling of his personage all the way to the enforcers station. There, he was locked inside with one officer who asked a lot of questions about the ‘red deserter,’ a description that Sunstreaker felt was quite apt. The enforcer however was no Prowl and he maintained his silence rather easily, piecing together the situation as the questions became more pointed.
So, Sideswipe had been seen out and about downtown Polyhex. Sideswipe had been getting completely smashed and interfaced his way through most of the local population. No one had been able to identify them and they had no official records. The enforcers had come to the conclusion they were deserters because of their war-frames and had tracked Sideswipe back to the warehouse. After three joors of questioning, Sunstreaker had put together a cover story that would hopefully stop him from being executed.
And get the blame cast on his brother.
“It was his fault,” he said when there was a lull in the questions.
The enforcer assigned to him perked with interest. “The red deserter?”
Sunstreaker hesitated. He was no Sideswipe for whom lying came naturally but he had watched his brother deliver many ridiculous anecdotes that somehow sounded completely believable. The trick was to give something so utterly ridiculous that it had to be true because there was no way a sane mind would come up with it. Plus, humans loved stories like this which guaranteed that the logic driven enforcer had no choice but to believe it.
“I’m a split spark,” he said flatly. “The red mech is my twin. We were…experiments.”
The enforcer, whose identifier ping gave him the unfortunate designation Blotchy, was hooked. “Of course,” he said triumphantly, “You don’t have any records. What was purpose of these experiments?”
He could have said military weapon designs because he definitely looked it but was fairly certain it was a Bad Idea to advance the military technology of the past. “He was looking to make better soldiers by using the twin bond,” Sunstreaker said. He leant forward, “Can you imagine how devastation caused by warriors that were perfectly in sync? Able to co-ordinate attacks within a nanoklick, share visual inputs and tactical processing?”
Sunstreaker didn’t need to imagine it because his bond had been honed to such precision.
“He?” Blotchy’s optics were enormous.
“Yes,” Sunstreaker confirmed with a sage nod. Blotchy observed the odd movement in confusion and the frontliner remembered that was a human behaviour and stopped. “We knew him by the designation of…Jackwheel. I don’t know if he was working for the CAF, I think he was, or if he was doing it just because he could-”
-He could never understand the whole evil scientist thing in human stories, how they somehow managed to always have evil bases and expensive equipment, did no one think they were a bit strange? And yeah, he had thrown Wheeljack under the bus in his story but the enforcers weren’t going to figure it out and he needed a villain in this story and his choice certainly felt appropriate. Did Wheeljack even exist in this time? Probably, knowing his luck.
“-but the experiments were…wrong,” Sunstreaker finished.
“Wrong?” Blotchy was hanging on to his every word.
“They were cruel. For example, if he wanted to test how well we could use our bond to see through each other’s optics, instead of just disabling one of our sensors, he’d rip out our optics to ensure we couldn’t.”
Sunstreaker inwardly winced, he sounded bored. But to Blotchy’s audios, he sounded so completely traumatized; he couldn’t engage his emotion processing. “That’s terrible! Were you released or did you escape and how did you end up in that warehouse?”
“Half a vorn ago, we escaped from the labs using the skills we had learnt,” Sunstreaker said, “We knew Jackwheel would be looking for us so we hid. The plan was to wait for a few vorns before reintegrating into society. Someone,” the front-liner’s tone went sour, “Evidently could not wait.”
Blotchy looked worried, “We need to find your twin,” he said abruptly, “He’s in danger, Jackwheel could still be looking for him. And if he was working for CAF, then we need to put the two of you into protection.”
Sunstreaker shuttered his optics in surprise. “You won’t turn me over to them?”
“No,” Blotchy insisted fervently. “This sounds like there’s something sinister going on within their ranks,” the enforcer leant forward and stared directly into Sunstreaker’s optics. It was the crazy look. “We can’t trust anyone,” he whispered, “The enforcers might not even be exempt.”
Sunstreaker settled back to restore a decent amount of space and sanity between them. “You can’t bring him here,” he insisted. “If you find him, tell him…to keep waiting for that transmission. And that when I see him, I’m going to put my fist through his face-plate.”
Entry: 6
Sideswipe
“Oh,” Sideswipe said, watching the enforcers drag his brother away, “Oh, this is bad.”
Starscream gave a non-committal hum but didn’t release him. “What are you going to do now?”
The front-liner frowned. “Bust him out of there before he gets executed,” he answered. “You said you knew an enforcer.”
“Blotchy,” Starscream supplied.
Sideswipe paused, “Blotchy? Really?”
“Yes.”
“Do I want to know why?”
“No. No, you don’t.”
“Alright,” Sideswipe focused his attention back to the mission at hand. “He needs to be contacted. Get as much information out of him as we can without tipping him off,” he considered Starscream for a moment, was he actually going to depend on him to get Sunstreaker back? No. No, he wasn’t. “I really, really would prefer that I did this without you.”
“Oh?” Starscream challenged him.
“You could be arrested for this,” Sideswipe pointed out. The seeker’s face remained blank and unmoved. “What about your research? Your projects? You won’t be able to work on them and no institution will ever let you show your faceplates again.”
It was a low blow but he could see that he was getting through. “Fine,” Starscream grated out. “I’ll just head back to Vos then and leave you to handle all this, then?”
“Starscream,” Sideswipe said firmly, “I’m touched that you want to help, I appreciate it, I do, but you have no military training to speak and I can’t rescue…Sunswipe whilst worrying about you as well.”
And that was a statement he’d never imagined he would give in his lifetime.
Starscream’s faceplates tightened then he withdrew away from Sideswipe. “I’ll go back to Vos,” he said lowly, “But I’ll give you the passcode to my accommodation here so you have a place to lie low. I get the feeling they’ll be on the look-out for places like these.”
Entry: 7
There and back again
Arranging a rescue had been surprisingly easy. Blotchy had been delighted to help and prying out Sunstreaker’s story had almost caused Sideswipe’s processor to glitch. Sunstreaker had come up with this? And Blotchy had bought it? The enforcer was fervent in his desire to take Jackwheel down and expose the non-existent conspiracy in the CAF and Sideswipe felt a little guilty in taking advantage of the mech’s craziness.
Sunstreaker hadn’t spoken a word to any of the other enforcers and they kept him in a cell on station as they tried to ID him to no avail. Through Blotchy, the two Autobots were able to learn the security codes, the enforcers’ daily routines and the scandal between the Polyhexian ambassador and a pleasure-mech. They passed each other messages encoded with Autobot ciphers using Blotchy.
In the end, Sunstreaker simply broke his cuffs, disabled his cell and strolled out of the station after the cameras mysteriously shut off. He walked all the way to the location Sideswipe had given him and was unsurprised to see the expensively furnished apartment.
“Who did you interface with to get this place?” he said as he walked inside. “And what possessed you to call yourself Sidestreaker?”
“Speak for yourself, Sunswipe,” his brother shot back from the berth he was lounging on. “And uh, for your information, this is Starscream’s apartment. And people might call the enforcers if you beat the crap out of me.”
“Starscream,” Sunstreaker repeated flatly. “You’ve been interfacing with Starscream…whilst I’ve been sticking to the plan, not interfering with Cybertronian society and keeping myself unnoticed. Oh, and getting arrested because you can’t keep your cables to yourself. And I didn’t call myself Sunswipe, I never gave anyone my name.”
“I know and I told Blotchy that was your name,” Sideswipe said unrepentantly, secure in the knowledge that he was safe because Sunstreaker had no desire to get them both arrested, “And Starsceam.”
Sunstreaker exvented roughly before pushing past his brother to the washracks. “I’m going to kill you when we get home,” he said calmly. “I do hope you know that.”
Entry: 8
A Small Problem
They had been spent a grand total of five orns at Starscream’s apartment when they realised they had Big Problems.
It started with Sideswipe.
“Your energon intake has doubled,” Sunstreaker observed with great annoyance. He prodded his brother with a suspicious finger. “Why?”
Sideswipe shrugged helplessly. “I can’t keep my levels up,” he admitted, “I’m not sure why but it’s not exactly like I can go see a medic about it.”
Sunstreaker narrowed his optics at his brother. “You have self-diagnostics,” he said coldly. “What are they telling you?”
His brother squirmed uncomfortably and muttered something quietly. Sunstreaker stepped closer, violence bleeding into his field.
“I’m sparked,” Sideswipe muttered reluctantly.
Sunstreaker stopped.
Sunstreaker stared.
Then he turned away and said, “I can’t handle this, I am turning myself in.”
Entry: 9
Sunstreaker
Somehow, Sunstreaker made it into the CAF.
It may have had something to do with Blotchy. Or not. Sunstreaker didn’t really like thinking back on the events that had got him to this point. Serving with future Decepticons was far more preferable than dealing with Sideswipe’s situation. He probably shouldn’t have abandoned Sideswipe given his condition but he just couldn’t handle it anymore. Staying in his brother’s company would have lead to violence and punching and possibly losing the new sparks.
He had a very, very nasty suspicion anyway about what was to come.
Entry: 9
Sideswipe
Sideswipe hated his self-diagnostics and had a feeling that Sunstreaker had already foreseen this. The timing was certainly about right after all.
He was sparked.
With twins.
Something about this whole thing was terribly, terribly wrong.
Entry: 10
Sideswipe
The timing was absolutely correct.
Something was completely wrong with the reality but somehow the universe went on existing.
Sunstreaker was never going to forgive him for this.
Sideswipe gazed down at the two new mechs he had made and tried to keep himself from purging. He could remember being that small, could remember living in that exact frame.
This was so. Freaking. Wrong.
“Something’s strange about this one,” the ‘medic’ that had performed the spark extraction said. They were in a street clinic in Polyhex where no questions were asked about the patients. “His spark frequencies are exactly the same as yours.”
“Yeah,” Sideswipe said vacantly, “Funny that.”
The ‘medic’ arched an optic at him. “That doesn’t happen normally. Normally, it’s not my place to ask questions but spark cloning-”
“Would you believe I’m temporally challenged?” Sideswipe interrupted.
He felt the medic send a high frequency transmission and knew the enforcers had been called. Cursing wildly to himself, he grabbed his two new sparks and escaped out onto the streets. He debated what to do with them; he couldn’t keep them because he was going to return to his own time soon. He couldn’t let Starscream know because the Seeker was off-planet for his research. There was only one thing to do. He began the arduous journey to Iacon and left them in an orphanage there because that’s where he could recall growing up.
Karma, he was certain, was laughing at him.
He tracked down his brother’s comm frequency and sent him a message. It’s done. Sunstreaker got himself honourably discharged from service and returned to Starscream’s apartment.
“I hate you,” Sunstreaker informed him bluntly, standing in the doorway.
“Join the freaking club,” Sideswipe replied numbly.
“I was happier not knowing who my creators were. Seriously.”
“I am never going to be able to look at Starscream the same way again.”
“I am never going to be able to look at you the same way again.”
Sideswipe deflated onto his berth. “I hate Wheeljack.”
Sunstreaker gave a harsh laugh. “Sideswipe, this was all on you.”
Of course, it was around that time that Perceptor finally got a lock onto their signature and called them home. The twins both agreed it was something they would never speak of and then Sunstreaker promptly disassembled his brother upon arriving in the proper time.
The Autobot forces were extremely perplexed that Sideswipe helped him accomplish this task.
Addendum:
The newly onlined twins remained in the orphanage for five vorns before being forced out due to a reduction in energon availability. Had the two Autobot warriors never arrived, the orphanage would have been able to afford the energon prices. Sideswipe’s binges had drained a sizeable amount of energon.
Starscream returned from his research and lost his partner on a small, uninhabited planet.
Blotchy eventually put things together and realised that there was a mech called Wheeljack. The young engineer mech was put on trial for illegal experimentation but the case never made it through given the two witnesses involved had vanished and there was no actual physical evidence. Blotchy’s tendency to see conspiracies grew after his case was rejected. He became increasingly paranoid, eventually changed his name to Red Alert and joined the Autobot forces when the war broke out.
However, Wheeljack’s studies were sufficiently disrupted that he never made it through the academy and became a qualified engineer. The deficiencies in his studies meant that occasional mistakes were made in his inventions. One such mistake resulted in an explosion that sent Sunstreaker and Sideswipe back in time, thus setting off a chain of reactions that would lead to that explosion. The timelines had never been in any danger.
Everything was as it was supposed to be.
End
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