Name: Springtime
Author: Astsadi
'Verse: Movieverse, post-DotM
Characters: Will Lennox, Ratchet, Skids & Mudflap (being mocked, mostly), mentions Sideswipe and Sunstreaker
Rating: K

Summary: "What's up with Sideswipe?" Lennox asks a question with a complicated answer.

A lot of this is me exposing my thoughts and theories on Cybertronian twin 'biology', if you will, as well as expelling some dislike of the twins Bay did put in the movies in lieu of the real twins. I'd love for you to review with your thoughts :)

Enjoy!

"Hey Ratchet, what's up with Sideswipe?"

Ratchet turned slowly from whatever dismembered body part he was tinkering with on the countertop to face the miniscule human addressing him from the floor. Will Lennox stood as straight as he could, but still only came up to the mech's knee joint. Whereas in the past he would have been a little freaked out at the sight of what he knew must have been some sort of Cybertronian internal 'organ' under Ratchet's tender ministrations, Lennox now better understood their inorganic nature, and it was not so horrifying to see it there.

Still weird though.

The Cybertronians, while not having the impressive range of facial expressions that humans could conjure up, still had enough moving plates on their faces to give off easily-read expressions. And being the highly adaptable species that they were, they had, over the years they'd been on Earth, been able to pick up on the expressions humans used to communicate with each other. As a result of this, though he didn't quite have the articulation necessary for it, Ratchet was giving Lennox a very impressive approximation of an incredulous stink-eye.

"'Up' with him? What the frag's that supposed to mean?"

"You know," Lennox waved one hand around vaguely, ignoring Ratchet's alien cussing. "What's wrong with him?"

His answer was a fair approximation of a snorting noise, sounding kind of like an engine backfire. "What isn't wrong with that Pit-spawn?"

From somewhere across the room there was an odd noise that sounded suspiciously like sniggering. Lennox turned to have a look, and saw the Chevy twins seated at the other side of the room. Skids was lying on one of the berths, propped up against the raised back, and Mudflap sat on the same berth next to him swinging his legs. The berth was designed for a mech far bigger than either of the pair, so the brothers fit comfortably on its surface.

"Heh, burn!" The green one hollered, backed up by another snigger from his orange twin.

"Shut your slagging mouths, you glitches," the medic snapped over at them. "You do something stupid, you get to sit in here and don't slagging bother me." Ratchet turned perfunctorily back to his project, muttering against the now-silent Chevrolets as they exchanged nervous looks, and dismissing Lennox by default.

But Lennox was used to the grumpy medic by this point, and wasn't all too fazed by his outburst and the rude, attempted dismissal. "Seriously Ratch,"

"Do not call me that," the mech snapped without turning. "Don't you start taking lessons in obnoxiousness from those slagging pests."

"Seriously, Ratchet," Lennox amended with just the smallest hint of smartass-ery. "Something's definitely wrong with him."

Ratchet heaved a long draft of air from his vents, an action Lennox knew to take as a longsuffering sigh, and put down his tools. "Are you telling me you're concerned about Sideswipe's medical wellbeing?"

"Sort of," Lennox shrugged. "I'm obviously not an authority here, but surely someone besides Epps and me has noticed it?"

"And what would 'it' be, Will?" He was asked as though being humoured like a small child. Of course in terms of age, every human on Earth was a baby to the Cybertronians, but Lennox still wasn't all too impressed by Ratchet's neo-patronization.

"He's like... brown?" the soldier clarified a little peevishly. "At first I just thought he wasn't showering properly, like it was dirt or dust or something? But Sideswipe's usually pretty good with keeping clean so that can't be it and besides it seems to be spreading? Like his paint is turning brown." He shrugged. "I don't know, I just thought it was weird."

One of the facial components above Ratchet's optic flicked upwards, making him look as though he were raising an eyebrow. "Ah," he said gruffly. "You wouldn't know, would you?" Lennox gave him a pointed look, and Ratchet gave another of his sighs. "Sideswipe is a twin, and –"

"Whoa," Lennox fell back a step and waved his arms around for a moment. "Hang on. Sideswipe can't be a twin. Where's his twin? Shouldn't he be dead – unless his twin is here? He doesn't seem that close to any of them. You can't get those two –" he indicated Skids and Mudflap, who were listening intently across the room. " – ten blocks apart before they start whinging about the pain in their sparks." He ignored the pair's huff of indignation.

Ratchet chuckled, and reached down for Lennox to get in his hand. The soldier did so and was neatly lifted onto Ratchet's worktop so as to be more or less level with the mech's chest. "Those two," Ratchet began, also waving a hand in the direction of the other two occupants of the med bay. "Are not pure twins."

"Pure," Lennox repeated. "There are different kinds of twins? Like identical and fraternal?"

"Similar," Ratchet affirmed. "I guess. Dumbest and Dumbass over there –" Said bots' squawks of protest were again seamlessly ignored. "– are what our kind call 'mechanical twins'." He waited for a nod from Lennox. "They're like the difference between a sparkling mech and a pre-program." Lennox nodded again, having already had explained to him the Cybertronian process of upgrading a mech from a sparkling frame to a youngling and then adult frame, like the raising of organic offspring, versus having a spark inputted into an adult frame with all necessary functions and knowledge already coded into it. The latter were almost always needed for very specific tasks or functions, while the former tended to be raised by at least one parent – Creator – in a more familial structure. Lennox knew more about this than most humans, since Epps was intensely curious about Cybertronian culture and drilled all available Autobots on it whenever there was opportunity.

"So Sideswipe is a pre-program?"

"Nope," Ratchet definitely snickered. "They are." He jabbed his thumb at the Chevy twins, who were both practically bristling at this point with the effort it took not to pipe up and defend their honour.

Unfortunately, that comment was the last straw, and Mudflap couldn't help the protest that burst out of him. "So wrong, Ratch! Das cold man! Skids and me ain't preeps!"

"Oh fine," Ratchet grumbled, visibly pleased at having irked them and not terribly fussed about the disregard for his orders to keep their vocalisers muted. "They're not pre-programs per se, but they're more science than your average sparkling mech. Perceptor would explain this better," he groused. "But basically – twins are slagging rare, and some of those rich and stupid types hired some scientists with more curiosity than sense to try to manufacture twins. They succeeded, I suppose."

He cast a very dubious look at the mechs in question, who had returned to being engrossed in their thumb war. At the moment he looked over, their hands got locked together, and they began to exchange expletives and insults as they tried to disentangle themselves.

Ratchet turned back to Lennox with exasperation written all over his face. "They were considered a success anyway. There were differing opinions on the matter."

"Cool," Lennox said musingly. "They make any more than those two?"

Ratchet shook his head once. "No, the war was getting very serious by that point. Nobody with the resources had time for anything but weapons, upgrades, and military frames."

"Right, so why are twins rare?"

"Ah, now that's the interesting part," Ratchet informed him, leaning forward slightly. "Pure twins, real twins, are created by a spark splitting before being put into its sparkcase."

Lennox gaped. "A spark splitting? Wouldn't that kill you guys?"

"Not a spark freshly out of the Allspark. Just as you humans can harvest stem cells from your offspring before they are fully formed, a Cybertronian spark is incredibly powerful and still mutating in the first few astroseconds of its life."

"Astroseconds?" Lennox picked up. "So if it splits after a few seconds..."

"It would extinguish. But in that first moment it's powerful enough to sustain the life of each frame."

"Okay, so ..." Lennox paused to think about this information for a moment. Then his eyes widened slightly. "Sideswipe only has one half of a spark? Can that really power his whole frame?"

"Remember the spark's resiliency when it's just forming," the medic amended. "Sideswipe's spark is actually abnormally large – the theory is that the spark swells in size out of fear of extinguishing, expanding exponentially in size until it's safely housed in a frame. It's never been tested for obvious ethical reasons, but it's hypothesized that a just-twinned spark would continue expanding if not put into a frame, possibly until it explodes. The energy released would be devastating – comparable to a nuclear explosion."

"What makes a spark split?"

"Who knows? I don't know," Ratchet shrugged. "A power surge? An anomaly? A deformity? The will of Primus?" He snorted. "Can't say for sure. It happens only once every several billion vorns. There have only ever been seven recorded sets of twins."

"Seven?" Lennox was reeling. Cybertronians were the longest-lived species he'd ever heard of – and that they had too, for that matter – so he was duly astounded that something like this had happened so few times in the recorded history of their species. "So how does this mean that Sideswipe can be separated from his twin but the other twins can't?"

"Skidflaps over there are joined frame to frame by mechanical bonds," Ratchet said less interestedly. "The scientists couldn't replicate a spark split so they tried to create a physical link. Their processors are merged," Ratchet tapped the side of his helm. "They can't be apart from each other because they would only have half a processor each, which isn't enough to run their frame. They give a whole new meaning to the term 'half-bit'." He sniggered yet again.

"I'm not feelin' tha love, yo!" Skids cried out.

Lennox ignored him, caught up in fascination. "And Sideswipe?"

"Spark bond, man," Mudflap cut in gleefully, rapping his fists against his chest over his spark chamber. "His bro an' him, dey got a bond right deep in der sparks." His voice took on a quality Lennox had never heard from either of them before – almost reverential. "They the real deal, Will. Pure-aft spark twins. Dayum."

Seeing no reaction from Ratchet, Lennox conceded to turn his attention to the other mech. "He and his brother are bonded? I thought a bond was like... marriage?" He couldn't help the slight grimace as the connotations all sprung to mind.

But Mudflap laughed dismissively. "Naw dawg, don't go all human 'bout it. Bonds are like marriage but dat's just tha best we got to 'splain it."

"Dey join two sparks t'getha, can't split 'em back up," Skids clarified, miming his explanation with his hands. "Sunny an' Sides they linked in der sparks. Dey one spark. But dey can separate 'cause they got der own sparks too so nothin' goes bad if der apart."

"But Skids and me, we split up yo and we can't work it." Mudflap shook his head. "Sucks man. I'm stuck wi' dis idiot."

"Speak fo' yo'self, Mouthflapper!"

Ratchet and Lennox turned away from the twins' bickering in one simultaneous motion, tuning them out to squabble as much as they pleased.

"I think I understand," Lennox said after a moment. "So here's the million dollar question: where's Sideswipe's twin?"

Ratchet grimaced. There was a deep undercurrent of sadness in the expression, and Lennox was taken mildly by surprise at the sight of it. "We don't know. After the Ark launched, the Autobots had to split up and we lost track. Sunstreaker was assigned on a different ship – the Artemis – which was tasked to ferry neutrals to one of our colonies. We haven't been in contact with any other teams except Dino's, and he says nobody knows the status of the Artemis.

"Or we didn't know," came the sudden amendment, and Ratchet's voice even perked up. "Back to your original question – why Sideswipe's looking brown recently? Our colour comes from nanites in our frames, that's why we go grey when our sparks are extinguished. The colour is dictated by our sparks; I guess a close approximation is your genetic code deciding upon the colour of your hair. You've only ever known Sideswipe grey because you've only ever known him living a staggering distance away from his brother. The twins may have oversized sparks – Sunstreaker's is even more mutantly huge than Sideswipe's, the slagger – but they still only have one spark between them. Without his brother's proximity Sideswipe's colour nanites have all but died out."

"He's dying?" Lennox asked in sudden concern.

"No," was his grouchy response. "Listen. His nanites and some other non-essential systems have gone into stasis in response to their separation. That's why he's got patches of colour –" He stopped, as though some horrifying but highly amusing thought had just occurred to him. "Slag me, I can only image how Sunstreaker's reacted to that." He shook his head and let out a chuckle that was on the sinister side of evil. "It's a shock response from the separation."

"Okay. So he's turning brown because..." His eyes popped open. "His brother is getting closer!"

"Bingo," Ratchet deadpanned. "His body senses the proximity of the other half of his spark and is coming back to life, in a way."

"Like springtime," Lennox smiled. Ratchet just stared at him, and he waved his hand as if to dismiss his comment. "Wouldn't have thought Sideswipe would naturally be brown. That sucks."

"Red, actually. Hellion red," he was corrected.

Lennox tipped his head to the side, trying to envisage a red Sideswipe. "Can't picture it, really. It's not really him."

Ratchet snorted. "It's him, Will, like it or leave it. You can bet your ass his mood's going to pick up too as Sunstreaker come closer."

"Sunstreaker is a cheerful sort then?"

The barking noise Ratchet let out could barely be described as a laugh, but his amusement radiated from him, letting Lennox know he'd said something dumb. He shook his head in exasperation.

"Fine then, it'll be good to have them both here though, right?"

Ratchet immediately stopped laughing. "Will, you have absolutely no idea what you are in for. No slagging idea."