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If Optimus and Wheeljack noticed how quiet Sideswipe was for the entire trip back to Nevada, they thankfully didn't ask him about it. Probably they were glad for his silence, he thought glumly. Surely they assumed his subdued mood was due to his injury, but after their initial questions as to the how such an injury had been obtained while he had supposedly just been idling at a public park, questions Sideswipe had staunchly refused to answer, they had not pushed the subject further.
Thank Primus for small favors. Getting himself hurt while in his Somali cat holoform when he wasn't even doing anything. Utterly embarrassing. He was a Primus-slagging champion gladiator, he'd regularly gone into pit fights stacked heavily against him and emerged with fewer injuries.
And he'd gone and hurt himself while jumping in his holoform.
Sunny was never going to let him live this one down.
Sideswipe's sullen mood was not improved when he was ordered to go directly to Ratchet upon their arrival back at the base, nor did the other Autobots' barely-contained slag-eating grins of amusement help either. Jazz at least could have played his delighted mood off as just his typical jovial self, but Mirage? Come on, that guy never smiled so baldly for anything.
He wanted to know what was so funny, though he had a sneaking suspicion they were laughing at him. But how could they know what had happened? He hadn't told anyone! It had to be Red Alert. They had been on completely different sides of the country but Primus knew that fragger could find a way to heck into a camera on the opposite side of the whole damn planet if he really wanted. Wait, were there cameras in public parks? Had the humans that were there had their phones out when The Incident happened? Had someone seen him pancake his holoform-self onto the hard flat ground when he fell out of that tree?
No. That was insane. He was being paranoid. Like Red Alert.
'Fragging Red Alert.'
It was only when he was sitting in the sectioned-off area of the hangar that Ratchet had claimed as his medbay (and a poor substitute for a real medbay it was), and the CMO was examining the quick field patches Wheeljack had made on him back in Florida, that Sideswipe began to have a suspicion that the Autobots were not finding his predicament amusing. Nobody had said anything that indicated they knew anything about his holoform misadventures. No, something else was going on.
'If Jazz is up and about after, well, I totally wasn't involved with that, then Sunny should be too. He should have been put on restricted duty here on the base. So where is he? Why isn't he griping at me about how unfair his life is?'
The querying comm he sent out to his twin went unanswered. Something was amiss indeed.
"Where's Sunny?" he asked of the CMO.
Ratchet almost lost what remained of his professional demeanor right then and there.
Sideswipe scowled at him, though the medic couldn't have seen his expression from the angle he was bent at to do his work. "Where the hell is he? He's not answering my comms."
"He's been grounded."
"The frag do you mean, 'he's been grounded'?"
Ratchet only shook his head, barely containing his amusement.
Sideswipe grumbled at Ratchet's refusal to give a clear answer, and sent another ping through his comm. As before, Sunstreaker did not reply. "Why isn't he answering my comms?" he repeated.
"He can't."
A rush of panic ran through him, his battle-ready programming instantly rising, and he had to remind himself not to stress-grip the med seat so hard or he'd break it. Again. Instead, he leaned forward, readying to stand, to move, to fight or find his brother or... "What's happened to him?" His voice came out much more anxiously than he had intended.
"Oh, calm down." Ratchet pushed Sideswipe back into the seat. "He can't answer because he's in his holoform. Still." The medic gave a small chuckle.
"That's bullshit," Sideswipe said, pulling out one of the many human phrases he'd picked up. His brother was not one to spend extended periods of time in his holoform, especially if there were more important things to be doing, like greeting your twin upon his return from the field. "His generator broken or something?"
"Not his generator."
With an annoyed snarl, Sideswipe made a half-hearted swat at the CMO with his clawed hand, which Ratchet batted aside without even sparing a glance away from his ongoing work. "Stop fragging around, what's going on with my brother?" As he said it, Sideswipe reached out through the bond he shared with his twin.
Sunstreaker did answer that nudge, though it was not so much an answer as an incoherent cloud of outrage and disbelief and embarrassment that came back to Sideswipe.
Well, this was new. Sideswipe blinked a few times, now less concerned and more curious. "Okay, doc, you've got me," he said, his earlier irritation gone. "What's going on?"
Ratchet's face broke into a ridiculous grin, and he stepped away from his patient to tap the intercom in the wall. "Red Alert, is Maggie there with you?"
-She is,- came Red's reply through the speaker.
The humans' tech was such a poor substitute for their Cybertronian equivalents. Made their voices sound all wrong on the intercom.
"Can you spare her for a moment? I need her in the medbay."
-Is this about Sunstreaker?- Slag it, Sideswipe could hear the grin on Red's face, even through the human intercom. Everyone should be so proud of him for how many times he hadn't punched that smirk right off the security freak's faceplates. Like right now.
"Sideswipe would like to know what's, um...happened with his brother." Ratchet glanced back at the nearby gladiator, his optics glinting gleefully.
-Oh, yes!- came Maggie's excited reply. -I'll be right there, I just need to grab the box.-
Sideswipe narrowed his optics suspiciously. "The box?"
Ratchet only continued grinning, even as he returned to his work on Sideswipe's minor, but extremely annoying, injuries.
The bulk of the repairs were done by the time Maggie finally made it into the medbay, carrying a large-ish (by human standards) plastic box by the handle on its top. The box's sides were perforated with small holes, though they were not big or numerous enough that Sideswipe could see what was inside.
Maggie was grinning, that same ridiculously amused expression that everyone but Sideswipe currently wore. "I was hoping you'd get back before he got a hold of himself." She dragged herself and the box up the stairway that wrapped around the side of the room, installed exactly so the humans could be off the ground and therefore not so underfoot around the Cybertronians. "Wanker was spitting the dummy while you were gone."
"He scratched a human again," Ratchet explained, though he sounded less annoyed about this than he had the previous times Sunstreaker had used his holoform to lash out at the humans.
"And since Optimus wasn't here to remind him of the rules about hurting us, and Ironhide's still having some R-and-R with the Lennoxes, well..." Maggie hefted the box and almost dropped it down on the metal table that was on the upper platform. She turned it around so one end, which was covered with a metal grate rather than plastic, was facing her. "I used to volunteer with the animal shelter back home, had to deal with plenty of little shits like him." She opened the metal grate and peered in. "So I got the honor of taking care of things." Then she reached into the box with both hands.
Sideswipe recognized the screeching that immediately erupted from within the box. Oh yes. That was Sunstreaker. Or rather, Sunstreaker's feline holoform.
Maggie withdrew a fabric-wrapped bundle from the box and, with a delighted cackle, held it up for Sideswipe to see.
It was Sunstreaker-the-Abyssinian, all right.
The towel was wrapped so snugly around him that only his head was visible, the rest of him held immobile by the confines of his fabric prison. His face was contorted in pure feline hatred as he let out another ear-piercing shriek of impotent fury directly at Sideswipe.
Utter rage rolled through their twin-bond, the kind that told Sideswipe he was soon going to find himself on a long stay in the medbay as Ratchet reattached his severed limbs, the only natural consequence for the betrayal of his brother by his bearing witness to this humiliation and doing nothing to help.
Sideswipe didn't care, as he was too busy laughing so hard he fell off the med seat and almost broke open all his fresh repairs. "Are you...Primus!" Sideswipe managed in between his howls of laughter, which only intensified every time he looked at Sunstreaker-the-Abyssinian bundled in his plush fabric cocoon, held aloft by Maggie like he was some child's cuddly but foul-mouthed toy. "Are you so fragging angry that you forgot you can turn off your holoform?"
The sudden and utter silence from both the cat and their twin-bond told him that yes, that was exactly what had happened.
"Holy...fragging Pits, Sunny! How long have you been...Primus!" Sideswipe sank to the floor again after trying to get back up onto the seat, unable to restrain his hilarity. "Have you been a kitty burrito all week?" He would have laughed himself flat onto the floor if he hadn't been bracing himself up with one arm, and even that was threatening to give way beneath him. "You can't...you've...you're so damn mad you couldn't even...holy shit!" Nope, he was done for. He let himself sink onto the smooth floor as the laughter wracked his body, ignoring that every single one of Ratchet's fixes had by now come thoroughly undone. The pain in his abdomen was worth it.
The cat blipped out of existence, leaving Maggie holding only a towel, which made her and Ratchet and Sideswipe collapse in another fit of uncontrollable laughter.
A moment later, a snarl of rage at an appropriately Cybertronian-sized volume echoed through the base. "You've got ten seconds before I kick your ass, Sideswipe!"
