Title: Unlikely Partners, 2/3

Author: Stormy1x2 (travelingstorm)
Rating: PG
Fandom: TMNT/Transformers
Word Count (Fic Portion): 3376
Summary: Continuing from where we left off, Sideswipe is in a bit of a predicament. Good thing Mikey's there to lend a hand.

Notes: Done as part of lj's fanfic100 themes, theme #37 – Sound. A fusion of the 2007 movie and old school Gen 1 (Season 2ish) because it has Sideswipe in it, and makes references to events in the movie.

Additional: I've changed this a bit – it was supposed to be a 2-shot, but it just kept growing. :) As a result, it will now be a 3-parter. I'm sure you're all horrified by this. :)

Pre-read by Sabrina (okamimyrrhibis) who must have set turn-around time speed records. Thanks Sab!

X-posted to tmntfanfic, tf2007fun and my own livejournal.

----

Sunstreaker was not a patient mech. Standing around, waiting for his Saturn-sucking brother to finish playing underground, letting the acrid smoke fumes and free-floating bits of debris to mar his paint job – these were not things he liked to do to pass the time.

His radio beeped and he brought the code up; a set of coordinates appeared in his field of vision. Sideswipe was just underneath him, entering a tunnel. He debated stomping his feet to dislodge a few extra rocks or something on his brother's head, but then decided that would be too immature. More of Sideswipe thing.

The local authorities were still huddled around the perimeter. Human paramedics were checking bystanders and locals who were injured in the Decepticon attack, as well as beginning preliminary investigations on the areas Sunstreaker had designated as safe. He folded his arms and glared at the ground. He was bored. Very bored.

He kicked idly at a slab of fallen masonry, ignoring the scowls and dirty looks from the cops nearby for disturbing a crime scene. Humans. Aside from a talented few in the field of automotive design, most had very poor taste in construction details. Particularly whoever had designed the building targeted by Starscream and his Seeker team. There were giant red shapes on the walls that resembled human feet – well, if the human had mated with a chicken. Well, maybe they had. From scanning the Internet one drab rainy day, he had come to the conclusion there were humans out there who would mate with almost anything. He rolled his optics. Vertebrates.

Micro-cycles went by. Sidewipe checked in and reported yet another room to check in. Sunstreaker passed the time by buffing the shine back into his shin guards – there was no telling what the chalk residue was doing to his paint job – and mentally tallying all the ways he was going to maim his sibling for the boredom he was being put through.

In the middle of polishing his forearm, his audio receptors picked up the high-pitched whine of a jet engine. His optics snapped upwards and he cursed in Cybertronian as his scanners registered a very familiar reading, coming in hard and fast.

Unsubspacing his gun, Sunstreaker waved at the humans to move. "Get back!" he shouted. Starscream had no compunctions about targeting humans in order to compromise an Autobot, and Sunstreaker was relieved to see the humans obey his order, scrambling backwards, shooting fearful looks at the sky as they tried to see the threat Sunstreaker had obviously picked up on.

He radioed in. "Optimus! Starscream came back!"

"Jazz and Ironhide are en route," Optimus replied immediately. "You and Sideswipe will have to hold them off until they get there."

Sunstreaker cursed. His sibling was not exactly in a position to be able to help him at the moment.

"Sunstreaker, do you copy?"

"...I copy, Prime," he said finally, watching the skies. Suddenly something fell from the clouds, honing in on him. His optics widened – MISSILES!

Whirling around, he grabbed two huge I-beams, chucking the first one at the incoming missile as hard as he could. His first strike was true, and the missile exploded in the air. Humans still watching, began screaming and running from the area. Sunstreaker could make out Starscream, circling around overhead. Then he cursed yet again, as this time, the jet fired off three missiles in rapid succession.

Sunstreaker hurled the other beam, but missed. Pulling his gun, he began firing, hoping to break the bombs up in midair. As he did so, he switched frequencies to warn his brother.

"SIDESWIPE!" he shouted, firing again. "Incoming!"

His blaster pulsed a laser through the heart of the second missile, pinpointing straight through the tip of the cone-shaped nose, exploding it into a million bits of shrapnel. The third one burst through the falling debris, heading for the remains of the building he was standing next to. Before he could blast it, a wave of energy washed over him, covering him in a purple light. His blaster powered down instantly. He tried to move his arm to check the readings but was shocked to realize he couldn't move.

Starscream's null ray!

With a growing sense of horror, he realized two things as the missile moved into its final swoop.

Number one – with his radio nullified, he couldn't warn Sideswipe about the missile about to explode over his head. And number two...

...this was going to hurt.

----

A surge of electricity racing through his central processor was what brought him out of stasis. Sideswipe felt his awareness come back gradually; internal sensors stuttering as his circuits came to flickering life, gradually growing stronger until, he was able to open his optics.

Whatever had hit him in his cerebral sensory bank had done a good job, but luckily, his internal repair system was top of the line. Outside of a little recalibration, his helm seemed to be in good enough shape that it would escape the wrath of Ratchet. His core systems though...he blanched at what his processors were telling him. He'd be lucky to escape a complete overhaul. At least his fuel lines were all intact, from what he could tell.

Internal repairs delivered what would amount to a human giving a swift kick in the hard drive, jolting his memory banks. Twisting his head around, he focused on the rubble covering his arms and hands. He could feel the weight of the turtle-human on the derma-plating covering his hands – the sensors there were incredibly sensitive. While there was no muscle movement from the creature, he could feel the heat of its body, too warm to be the cooling signs of death in humans he'd read about. He could also feel the trickling sensation of the creature's bodily fluids leaking from it, dripping between his digits into a red puddle under his hand. Not good.

Sideswipe tried to lift his left hand off his right one. Some of his nerve lines were damaged, he realized; his attempts resulted in a jerky, sporadic motion in his arm, until finally he more or less flopped it off the other, dislodging the rubble. Now to open the hand. Concentrating, sending every last bit of his determination into his processing commands, he was rewarded with a slow unfurling of his fingers.

The turtle was curled up in his palm, arms wrapped around its head. It was still breathing, something that made Sideswipe sigh in relief, though he had no lungs – and therefore no need – to breathe. It was still alive.

"Hey...turtle. You awake?" Well, his vocalizer escaped damage. That was a good thing. "Hey, come on – don't die on me now."

There was nothing. Sideswipe felt his emotion circuits dampen themselves slightly, but before he could do anything, a low moan came from the turtle.

"..ik'y..."

"What was that?" His audio receptors could pick up the sound of a Decepticon's jet engines hovering at twenty thousand feet, but it couldn't translate the garble that came out of the being's mouth.

"My name...s'Mikey," the turtle mumbled.

Sideswipe watched as the turtle – Mikey - uncurled itself gingerly. The strange cloth banding's around its arms and face were red with blood, though they'd previously been identified as orange. "I'm Sideswipe. You're really hurt now, aren't you?"

Mikey gave him a weak grin. "Nah. Just a flesh wound."

That made Sideswipe laugh. He and Sunstreaker had been roped into a Monty Python marathon just a few weeks earlier; the Aerialbots were addicted to pop earth culture, and were relentless in the quest to educate the other Autobots on its importance in understanding the beings that populated the planet they were currently inhabiting. Whatever. Sideswipe just liked Holy Grail for the gratuitous – and completely fake – violence.

Still, this wasn't television. "Did you break any part of your structural support?"

The turtle blinked at him, confused. "Say what?"

Primus thank the stars themselves that humans had managed to devise a means of extracting information on just about anything. The Internet was a wonderful place. "Did you break any bones?" he clarified.

"Oh." The turtle thought about it for a second, moving its legs gingerly. "Well, my fingers ain't doin' so great, but that happened before all the booms and stuff. My ribs don't feel so hot either, but I think they're bruised, not broken." He grinned again. "All in all, I think I'm doin' good, all things considered."

"You're covered in your vital fluids," Sideswipe said flatly. "If I were leaking from my fuel lines, I would definitely not be 'doing okay'."

Mikey reached up and ran a hand lightly over his head. "Just some scratches," he said. "A little deeper then is probably healthy for me, but not serious. Head wounds always bleed a lot."

"If you say so." Satisfied that the turtle was not in any immediate danger of going off line permanently, he turned his attention to his internal processors, specifically, his radio. Attempts to contact Sunstreaker failed, which worried him. His radio was in rough shape, but according to his self-repair system, he – theoretically - should be able to reach at least Sunstreaker, who was the closest 'bot to him. He didn't have the power required to boost his signal strength for some reason--

"So Sideswipe... is this purple-y pink stuff, like, your blood or something? 'Cause, um, you seem to be leaking your vital fluids too, if that's the case.""

Sideswipe blinked his optics, in surprise focusing on the cooling pool of energon forming under his torso. He hadn't noticed it, but it would explain the extreme weakness in his body. A micro-fuel tube must have severed somewhere in his chest. "Kind of."

The turtle – Mikey, he reminded himself again – looked a little uncomfortable. "So I'm thinking it's better off inside of you, huh?"

"You're thinking right." Sideswipe tried to shift a bit on to his side, just enough that he could see the damage, but there was too much debris pinning him down, and now that he was more aware, he could see his powering systems were dangerously close to redlining. "I think a fuel tube was cut."

"And that's a bad thing," Mikey nodded. "Too bad I don't have a giganto-sized band aid."

At that, Sideswipe perked up. "I do," he remembered. "It's in the area of my vehicle form that you'd call a 'glove box'."

Mikey stared at him. "You have band aids in your glove box?"

"No. But I do have the Transformer equivalent of an emergency first aid field kit." He tried to shift again, but only succeeded in dragging his right arm back over and pushing himself up on his elbow. His left arm, the one that had protected the turtle by covering his right hand, was free, but the nerve damaged he'd guessed at earlier was deteriorating further – he couldn't flex his fingers at all. "I just can't get to it."

Mikey pushed himself up, staggering to his feet. "Can I help you?" he asked. Fresh blood poured from his wounds, but the flow seemed muted somehow. Sideswipe surmised the turtle's own internal repairs were hard at work sealing the cracks in its flesh. "Where's the kit?" Mikey paused, staring at the Autobot. "Come to think of it, where's your glove box?"

"In my chest plate," Sideswipe told him. Pushed up, he freed up enough space that the turtle could crawl under him and reach through the broken windshields. "Can you reach it?"

"As long as you don't fall on me dude, we're all aces." Mikey crawled underneath him, disappearing from sight. Sideswipe could feel him gripping the paneling that surrounded the windshield, reaching through the shattered glass to his interior. It was almost disturbingly intimate, but he rationalized the necessity of the maneuver to preserve his own existence. "Oh, gross. You're bleeding all over me."

"Transformers don't have blood," Sideswipe corrected him.

"Whatever. It's dripping and it's slippery and sticky at the same time which is something I never thought was possible." The turtle's questing fingers found the glove box, and Sideswipe felt his subspace compartment open up. His audio receptors easily picked up the sound of the turtle's in-drawn breath. "Whoa...hello Star Trek."

Sideswipe groaned. "Did you find it yet?" He didn't know how much longer he could prop himself up. His arms were shaking slightly, his optics growing dimmer at the edges of his vision.

"I think so, if you mean am I reaching into a dark void - that's totally creeping me out, just so you know – and pulling out a box the size of Raph's motorcyle," Mikey grumbled. "It's heavy."

"Hurry,"Sideswipe urged him. "Can you lift it out?"

There was a pause, and then he heard a loud grunt of effort. He felt something fall and strike the windshield. Mikey's panting voice echoed from inside his chest compartment. "Okay, I pulled it partway out, but it's heavy and I can't carry it. If I move it a bit, it'll fall through the window and land under you. Is that okay?"

"Fine." His arms were definitely shaking now.

There was another pained sound from the turtle, a quick gasp that was swallowed just as quickly, and then the medic-box Ratchet had equipped both he and Sunny with came crashing to the ground. It was small compared to a typical box, but it was still over six feet long, a little over two feet wide. A minute later, it was being shoved out in front of him, the turtle pushing with all its remaining strength. "Okay," Mikey gasped, head hanging down as he tried to catch his breath. "Now what?"

"Open the box," Sideswipe directed. Before the turtle did anything, he needed to drink his emergency energon cube. He wouldn't be able to stay conscious long enough to hold himself up if he didn't, and if he fell while Mikey was attempting to patch him up, well... "Give me the cube. The one filled with the same colored liquid as the stuff on the floor."

"You drink your blood. That's disgusting." Mikey opened the box. Half of it was the same kind of black void, spacey-looking thing that had been in the Transformers chest. The other half was a cube filled with the pinkish water-like stuff. It didn't look very big. "Will that be enough to replace what you lost?"

Sideswipe chuckled weakly. "Not a chance. But it's not normal energon – it's super-compressed, highly concentrated. You drink this stuff any other time, and you'll--" he searched for an appropriate comparison. "--overdose, I think is the term. But in this case, it'll save my life."

"Gotcha." Mikey blinked. "Um, I don't think I can lift that, and you can't move your hands enough to get it up to your mouth."

Slaggit. Sideswipe growled. But before he could attempt to move anyway, the turtle was digging through the rubble. What is he doing?

"Eureka!" The turtle turned around, brandishing a large section of piping that had come down from the ceiling, severed by the falling sheet metal. "One jumbo-sized straw, coming your way!"

He stuck an end in the cube, and held the other end of the pipe out. Sideswipe grinned and leaned forward to catch the other end. A minute later, the box was empty, and Sideswipe felt a rush of energy go through his systems. "Whoa."

"What a rush, huh?" Mikey grinned at him. "But that's just gonna come right back out if we don't do something about your leaking 'vital fluids'."

Sideswipe nodded. "When you were getting the kit, you felt fuel dripping on you. Did you see where the line was cut?"

"...I think so," the turtle said. Sideswipe could hear the uncertainty in his voice. "I mean, it was pretty steady from just over my head."

The Lamborghini tried to calculate angles and realized that the leak must have been from one of the smaller fuel lines that fed into his central line, maybe two. It would explain why he hadn't bled out completely – the line itself was one of several, and the flow was distributed evenly among them all. "The line needs to be patched. In the kit should be another transparent box, with a black, tar-like substance inside. It hardens within thirty seconds of being exposed to the elements. You need to hold the tear as close together as possible and then smear it on top. In seconds it will stop the flow, and then completely harden."

Mikey nodded. Reaching into the blackness of the box, he had to use both hands and brace his legs to tug the box out. Sideswipe knew the box wasn't heavy by human standards, but it was just as big as the emergency energon cube. After a minute, Mikey fell to the ground, unable to pull it out. "Umm... this isn't gonna work."

"It has to," Sideswipe said, frustrated. "If you don't, I'll be permanently off line in less then twenty minutes."

"Hang on." The turtle surveyed the room, and then looked back up at the Transformer. "You can move your right arm a bit, right?"

"A little," Sideswipe confirmed. "Don't expect miracles, though."

"I won't. But if I tie a rope or something around the box, and then tie the other end to your finger, can you like, pull it out for me?"

"That would work." Sideswipe grinned weakly. "You're fairly smart for a creature that typically resides in a human's fish tank."

"Hardy-har-har," Mikey grumbled, pulling his long-tailed bandanna off. He pulled off his arm bands and knee pads and tied them altogether, putting together an odd-looking rope. Attaching one end to a side handle on the box, he limp-stumbled to Sideswipe's hand and tied it around the index finger. "Okay, pull."

Sideswipe was still braced on his hands to hold himself up, so all he did was jerk his hand back, a little more underneath his body. The patching box fairly flew out of the repair kit. Mikey grinned. "Awesome! It worked!"

"It was a good idea," Sideswipe told him. "Now, if you don't mind, I'm kind of eager to survive this experience. If I die, my brother will kill me."

Mikey laughed. "I actually get that," he said, moving underneath Sideswipe's chest plate. He disappeared from sight but he could still be heard. "Okay, I'm just gonna poke my head through your windshield here and take a look at this. Man, too bad Donnie isn't here. He'd fix you up in no time."

"Donnie is your genius brother," Sideswipe recalled.

"Yup. This'd be like, cakewalk for him." There was a pause. "Okay, I see a bunch of black tubes all leading to one big one--"

"One of the little tubes is leaking," the Lamborghini informed him. "You need to find it and patch it up."

There was another pause, which made Sideswipe a little concerned. "Mikey?"

"...sorry. Just catching my breath. My body isn't exactly thrilled that I'm doing something other then lying down and dying peacefully at the moment." Another pause. "Um, Sideswipe, that big fuel line of yours?"

"Yes?"

"It's got a small cut in it too."

Sideswipe froze. "It does?"

"Yeah. Looks like whatever cut through the smaller tube, finished the swipe just at the edge of your big one. It's a steady bleed, but it's small."

"So quit talking and start patching!"

"Aye, aye," came the tired, yet cheerful voice. Sideswipe saw Mikey come back out and open the box, scooping out a giant handful of the patching adhesive, close the lid, and go back under.

He could feel the adhesive being smeared over the lines, and immediately felt the difference it made. The slow leak he'd been feeling tapered off and stopped completely as the salve hardened in the stale air. A minute later, Mikey came back out, hands completely covered in black tar, and an air of satisfaction surrounding him. "Is it fixed?"

"So far, so good," Mikey told him tiredly. "Can I sit down down now?"

Without waiting for an answer, the turtle stumbled to its knees, and keeled over. Sideswipe started in alarm. "Mikey?!"

The turtle lay still as death.

----

End Part 2

I never expected this fic would get the reception it has. I'm thrilled you're all enjoying it so much. I hope this chapter matched your expectations. Thank you very much for reading this. :) Part three will be out very shortly.