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It’d all gone to pieces, as he’d always known it would; entropy reached out and swallowed them all up one by one. Wildrider first, because he never wrapped his head around ‘too much’; for some reason it still came as a surprise.
Breakdown got bad after that. The paranoia, the glitching; it all just got worse. Motormaster tried to make up for it, but he went next, on a mission they never would’ve been on if Wildrider had still been alive, caught in an explosion they wouldn’t have had to deal with in any other world.
Then Drag Strip, driven to extremes none of the rest of them really understood, something about the silent-cold of the bonds hitting him harder than Breakdown and Dead End. He’d burnt himself out. When they brought him to Hook his entire cranial wiring had become one melted lump of metal, and his fuel pump had stress fractures all down the length of it that even the notorious perfectionist didn’t know what to do with.
He and Breakdown had made it a while longer, limping along. Breakdown was too paranoid to die, it seemed. And Dead End didn’t know why he was alive.
But Breakdown had to go, too. Yesterday he’d been alive, squirreling datapads and files away with Dead End before a mission on Cybertron, one Dead End wasn’t part of. They hadn’t liked it, but it was what it was. Dead End had felt him flare out in the bond, and then go silent and cold like the others.
He didn’t know why he had been the one left alive. He didn’t want to be. So he’d lay himself down, turn his systems off one by one… and out of all of them, he’d be the only one to reach a quiet end.