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Chapter Twenty Four – What's A J.J?
Lennox looked like, even though he felt awkward, he knew he had to ask, "Okay, um, do you want to take a seat?"
She shook her head, and her hand relaxed and then tightened on Optimus's finger again, clearly hoping that making sure he was still there would comfort her a little more. "N-No, thanks though. I'm just gonna, gonna stand here." She stuttered through her sentence.
He nodded, "Okay, uhm…" he seemed awkward as he struggled to find how to start this now that the victim was actually in front of him, "Can you just start by telling us what happened? How did he get in there?"
She swallowed deeply, but nodded. "Okay, I-I-I was in the garage 'cause I wanted to get some work done, but then I decided to start on the import. S-Some of the stuff I ordered that I thought I'd need for it had come in so I figured I had to start somewhere, and it shouldn't be wasting space. I was just, I was just starting to work on it, put oil through the engine because I found it had no oil in it, and when I was checking the undercarriage there was something, some kind of, uh – wire that wasn't connected to anything, so when I found where it went I plugged it in and something started happening. I-I-It almost sounded like something was trying to start up but it wasn't making it there."
She stopped to take a shaky breath in as she readjusted her hand on the metal in her grasp. Epps didn't miss the way tears welled up in her eyes as she closed her eyes while she thought back to the incident.
"Uhm, I heard the sound three or four times and then I looked up at the undercarriage of the car and there was… there was two purple eyes staring back at me."
A tear fell from her left eye and rolled down her cheek, and she looked over her shoulder as if to make sure, despite the fact that she still had a death grip on his finger, Optimus was still standing behind her.
"Its okay, you're okay." He reminded softly.
She swallowed deeply, looking down. "Then he started unfolding, and transforming. When he tried to stand up he smashed his head into the roof, and then he started spitting and trying to talk but I don't know what language he was speaking. He let his first shot go, and I think that was just to scare me because his aim originally wasn't even close to being near me, but something in his leg let go and he fell forward. He tried to catch himself with his free hand, but I think the palm of his hand landed on top of the pit because his fist ended up beside me down there, and he smashed his face into the side of the concrete, and I think that caught him off guard because that's when he fired the second bullet, I think on accident or out of surprise, and it landed in the back wall."
She stopped talking, letting her head hang between her shoulders as she paused in her explanation. Optimus twitched his finger to remind her that he was still right behind her, right there for her.
After she didn't continue speaking for about twenty seconds, Lennox prompted her to continue, "Did he hurt you at any point?"
She shook her head, wiping her tears off with the corner of her blanket and she raised her head back up. "No. No, not really. Um, he hadn't gotten up so I got out of the pit and tried to get out of there before the roof caved in, but he tripped me right outside. And then Optimus showed up."
Lennox nodded.
"So he was disguised as the old piece of shit that we picked up from your house?" one of the men on the catwalk, about five feet from her, called out.
She nodded. "Uhm, yeah. Yeah, I guess."
"Where did you find him in the first place?" Epps asked from beside her.
She swallowed tightly. "Uhm, my old Boss's dad used to hoard old, broken down cars like his life depended on it. A while ago I was just walking through the back junk yard, and I found it sitting beside an identical one. It was in shitty shape, that much I could tell, but it was the better of the two, it actually had an engine sitting in the engine bay, and it looked like there was enough stuff in there already that I could make it run again for cheap. Bill sold it to me for, like, a hundred bucks, and I got it towed home."
"And you just never got around to working on 'im?" Lennox questioned.
She shook her head. "I was more focused on finishing the old Ford I had first, then the Chevy Impala that my buddy asked me to flip for him, and then the old C10 that I sold a couple weeks before you guys found me because I knew I could fix them for cheap and sell them. I told myself that once the C10 was sold, I'd start on the import, but then you guys found me so I never really started it. I know when I first brought it home I siphoned all the gas out of the gas tank to make sure it wouldn't cause any more problems, but I think that was it."
Lennox nodded. "Okay, um, so that's how he got in, how did he not trigger any sensors though?"
"If he was in a fight before he went offline, and if he concealed his Energon signature before he passed out then none of us would have caught it at any point, and the energon detectors out that way would have completely missed it too." Ironhide mentioned.
"Depending on the timeline, we may not have even had detectors set up out there yet. He might have showed up and J.J might have moved him before we had them put in place." Chromia piped up.
"That is true, and because he and Sideswipe are twins they share a spark, and it is possible that the detectors weren't strong enough to pick up the faint differences between the mechs once he arrived at any point or location, so they didn't alert us to anything because Sideswipe's signature is already logged in to their database." Optimus hypothesized.
"Sideswipe's twin?" J.J mumbled to herself.
"Don't get me started." Ironhide grumbled.
"Sunstreaker and Sideswipe are siblings," Optimus started, causing her to turn around and readjust her hand on his, "Twins, to be precise. When Sideswipe arrived at Earth with the second round of Autobots to arrive, he explained that they were on their way here and Sunstreaker got separated, and Sideswipe was sure that he had offlined. He couldn't feel their bond anymore, nor could he reach him with their COMMs so he concluded that he had gotten into an accident and not made it out."
"And now that resilient fragger made his own tin aft's way here." Ironhide grumbled.
"Which lines up, because Sideswipe got here, what, almost two years ago now?" Elita One spoke up.
"It'll be two years in about three weeks." One of the techies behind Lennox answered.
"When did you find Sunstreaker in the junk yard, J.J?" Lennox asked.
"The, uh, the import?" Jess asked over her shoulder.
"Yes." Optimus confirmed for her. "His real name is Sunstreaker."
"Um, well we hadn't seen it before so we assumed that it was just hiding back there the whole time, but I found it about two years ago, maybe take away two or three months."
"So the timelines match up, Sideswipe and Sunstreaker were headed here and got separated, both of them made it here to Earth, but something happened to the golden slag for brains and he never made it to his twin." Ironhide summarized.
"And when he thought he wouldn't be able to make it out, and he knew he wasn't gonna be able to keep going, he locked all of his signals down and hid in what looked like an old junkyard where he could take an alt mode that would fit his engine requirements. Probably figured if he was lucky, his repair nanites would do most of the work, enough that we could find him again. He knocked out before he had time to make sure it was actually a junk yard, and he'd actually be able to wake up. The next morning, J.J shows up at work and finds him," Elita One concluded, nodding, "It all lines up."
Optimus hummed as he agreed silently.
"So… why did he not wake up, what happened to him?" Epps furrowed his brows as he glanced at Ironhide.
"How the frag would you like me to know, squish?" the Weapons Specialist jerked back in confusion. "I'm not the one who clearly lost the fight." He smirked.
"When he reawakens, I'll get the answer for you, Major." Optimus reassured.
Lennox nodded at him as he watched Jess squeeze the finger in her grasp and readjust her grip.
"Thanks, Prime."
X0X0X0X0X0
In the following four days that passed, Sunstreaker had yet to actually wake up. He'd shown tonnes of improvements, and Ratchet had done everything he could to fix him up as much as possible with the resources available, but the mech, Sides guessed, wanted to nap a little longer.
Ratchet was starting to get irritated with the silver frontliner, the mech's failure to leave his Med Bay for a decent amount of time starting to get on the CMO's nerves. Between his constant chattering, his horrible jokes, and always calling him by that wretched nickname, Ratchet was pretty sure that soon he was going to blow or a fuse.
"You do know that I can care for your brother perfectly fine on my own, right? I've been a Medical Officer longer than you've been alive."
Sides looked over from where he was sitting, his feet propped up on the side of his mattress that his brother lay upon, and he shook his head.
"I know, but nah. If he wakes up swinging again, it'll be a lot more beneficial of an outcome if I'm here to chill him out. Besides, you saw how he reacted to seeing J.J, he was definitely in the middle of some scrap and probably had to hide to save his own aft."
Ratchet shook his head. "Sunstreaker's also never encountered a human before. Had he been in the middle of a battle, I can imagine waking up to see an unknown species that looks like a bug form back home, underneath him and poking and prodding about in his undercarriage didn't help ease his nerves. Maybe, for all he knew, he was being experimented on."
Sideswipe shrugged. "Whatever, I'm gonna stick around. You'd miss me too much." He smiled cheekily.
Ratchet rolled his optics. "Oh, yippee."
Sideswipe snorted as suddenly something on the monitor that was hooked up to Sunstreaker beeped as his spark started racing.
In the span of two seconds after them looking over to the monitor, the golden gladiator tried to sit up abruptly with a snarl. A blade slid out from his subspace as he panted once he realized he was tied down, and he immediately tried yanking his hands out of the cuffs, and when he failed to do so it seemed to panic him even more.
"Sunny!" Sideswipe called as he stood up, switching over to Cybertronian, "Sunny! Sunny, its me!"
The mech's optics, which had been turned purple in his travels for some odd reason, narrowed in on Sideswipe, then flashed back to Autobot blue and in a split second, with as much as he could muster, he reached up and smashed his forehead into Sideswipe's, sending his twin reeling backwards.
"Ah, Sunny! Its me."
The gladiator stopped as soon as his forehelm made contact with Sideswipe's, and as he relaxed back into the berth, he grunted out. "I know. That's for letting them keep me tied down."
He was speaking in Cybertronian too, clearly unable to speak English yet, and Ratchet chuckled as the interaction began between the twins.
"Sorry bro, but do you remember what you almost did to J.J?"
Sunstreaker huffed angrily as he jangled the cuffs he was still in. "What the frag is a J.J? And you wanna take this stupid fragging things off?"
Ratchet stepped forward and unlatched one of the handcuffs, while Sideswipe mirrored his actions on his other wrist.
"The human that you almost killed." Sideswipe explained further, "She was trying to fix you when you woke up, and you damn near decimated her."
"J.J, human, you're throwing a lot of fragging words at me that I don't understand."
Sideswipe chuckled, "Well if you'd finally open the fragging bond then I could transfer everything to you without having to make you download everything one at a time."
Sunstreaker huffed. "That still exists? I haven't felt or heard from you in forever."
Sideswipe unbuckled the cuffs that kept Sunstreaker's peds in place. "Coming from you? I kept looking for you for months."
Sunstreaker sighed as he sat up, rubbing his wrists. "Month?"
Sideswipe laughed as Sunstreaker finally located where ever he'd hid the bond and pulled it open, and Sideswipe jerked back to sit in his chair from shock. He recuperated quickly, and sent everything he knew, everything he'd learned, everything he'd been through, everything that could help Sunstreaker over the bond.
The once-golden bot's optics went wide. "We're sharing a planet with squishes?" he asked.
Ratchet huffed. "Indeed we are. They offer resources for us to continue on living, and in turn we offer protection, military services they wouldn't have access to without us."
"So we have to suffer here on this gross aft planet because they offered us Energon?"
Sideswipe shook his head. "Not Energon, but some kind of stuff that can be converted."
Sunstreaker huffed. "And Jazz?"
Ratchet licked his lips as the room got quiet. "We salvaged what we could, but it wasn't enough to rebuild a whole frame, and neither Optimus nor I saw the point in keeping him awake and suffering like that, so I have him in an induced coma, and we're hiding him to try and keep the affair as private as possible until I can find a way to build him a fully functional lower half that works with what we saved. We'd really rather not have the humans sticking their noses in this."
Sunstreaker huffed. "So that's it? That's all of us? We used to rule a galaxy, and now there's nine of us begging for scraps from some tiny, inferior species just to keep us going?"
Ratchet's helm tilted in confusion. "There's twelve of us."
Sunstreaker rolled his eyes. "Skids and Aftflap don't count because they're slagging useless, and Jazz isn't conscious, now is he?"
Sideswipe stuck his bottom lip out as he nodded. "Point taken."
"So there's nine of us." He reaffirmed.
"Guess so."
Ratchet sighed. "Yes, by those standards there nine of us."
"Well, and J.J!" Sideswipe pointed out. "Which kinda counts now."
Sunstreaker furrowed his brows. "Who?" he asked
Sideswipe looked at him in question. "I sent everything I have to you."
He huffed. "I must have skipped over him, I was more concerned about, y'know, the rest of us."
Ratchet sighed. "J.J is Optimus's sparkmate."
Sunstreaker's optics got wide in surprise. "Wait, there's ten of us? Who the frag names their sparkling J.J?"
The CMO snickered as Sideswipe cleared his throat.
"No, uh… J.J's not one of us. She, uh, Optimus found her while out on a recon op about seven or eight months ago, and discovered pretty fast that she had the Imprint. But she isn't one of us, per se."
Sunstreaker furrowed her brows. "What the frag do you mean? How is she his Imprint if she's…"
The newest addition to the team paused as something, some kind of look covered his face, what Sideswipe perceived to be shock and disgust.
"A human." Ratchet confirmed.
Sunstreaker looked almost like he was about to throw up. "The Imprint chose an organic? How the frag is that even possible, oh Primus that's disgusting."
Ratchet laughed at him. "She isn't just any human, Sunstreaker."
He snorted, "Yeah I'm gathering that."
Sideswipe laughed, "No, no, you don't get it Sunny. Ratchet's right, she isn't just any random human on this base."
He huffed, "Fine, I'll bite, who is she?"
Sideswipe snorted and Ratchet looked over at the newly awoken mech.
"J.J's the human that saved you from becoming actual scrap metal; she's the reason you woke up, and the reason we found you. She also just so happens to be the human you attempted to shoot off the face of this planet not even four days ago."
His face deadpanned at the revelation.
FIN
Date Started: October 13, 2020
Date Finished: October 14. 2020
Last Edited: March 24, 2021