Chapter Text
Chromedome was right—it is pretty hard for a Cybertronian to kill themself.
Like, he started out the decacycle with engex—some Praxian gin that went down light and easy, nothing serious—then around three cycles in he got his hands on some weapons-grade nucleon, by five he got speeders, and here, now, eve of nine-outta-ten, he’s finally snagged himself some syk. He hasn’t used it yet, been staring at the packet in his palm somewhere between the last five kliks and three breems, but he’s a little too distracted by the fact that he hasn’t died yet to take it. You’d think a decacycle-long bender would kill a guy, but no. Still kicking.
Almost unconsciously, he kicks out his foot along with the thought, and it hits the table leg with a dull thud. It’s not a very sturdy table, but he kicks it again, harder, giggling at the impact like a fucking newbuild. Cheap little motel; no more sugar daddy Drift, not for thousands of orns, and he’d sooner chew off his own arm than ask Thunderclash for a stack of shanix just to have a nicer place to die in. What a class act that would be, a real Rodimus all-timer. Bet they would've talked about it at his funeral if he had—y’know he didn’t even pay for the motel that he died in? Maybe he killed himself so he wouldn’t have to pay Thunderclash back. Woof. Yeah, no. He’d rather die in his shit-tier motel room with his own hard-earned cash, thanks.
Will he even have a funeral? They’ll have to find him first. Unfortunately, he’s kind of a recognizable guy, so it probably won’t be too long until people start talking. A decacycle isn’t all that long for a bot to dip, but when two pass, Captain TC might start to get a bit antsy, put out some feelers on his whereabouts. Then some mech might say, oh, I saw him around Cerulean Street, in New Polyhex, and that might raise some alarm bells, because Polyhex? As in, where the Dead End was on old Cybertron?
The Dead End is not, as Rodimus was rather disappointed to learn, the same on Functionist Cybertron as it was on old Cybertron. Oh, sure, they started out the same, but that little split in history really did a number on it. Damn place got suuuuuper gentrified. How was he supposed to know? He’s been in space, exploring or whatever, he hasn’t really had the time to get to know all the differences between this planet and his dead one.
He hadn’t felt like taking his shuttle anywhere else, though, so he’d stayed in Polyhex. He’d stayed around the Dead End. He’d stayed walking and driving in circles for cycles until he found the dredges, the deep stains in the city that the Functionist council couldn’t quite clean out, and only then did he finally park his ass in the only motel in the area and crash for thirteen breems. They call this part of Dead End the Pit; little on the nose, but then again, so is Dead End, and on this world, that name’s lost its bite. Someone had broken in while he was asleep—well, it would have been breaking in, had he remembered to lock the door in the first place—but he hadn’t gotten the nucleon nor the speeders yet, and he hadn’t drawn any physical shanix yet for the street, so they left as empty-handed as he’d been. Only reason he knows someone had come in the first place is because the door had been wide open when he’d woken up, blinding him with afternoon light.
So they’ll probably be able to track him to the Dead End. After that, they might get some reports about a very unhappy red-and-orange bot stomping around, whining at people on street corners and asking where they took all the drugs, and some mechs—maybe even the same mechs who did so for Rodimus—will probably be able to point towards the Pit, and they’ll be real hot on his tail at that point. Like a treasure hunt. Maybe he should paint a big red X on his chest, so that when they find him, they can laugh, like, X marks the spot! It’ll be funny. Actually, that’s not a bad idea. Nope, yeah, he's just decided that it's a great idea. He should buy some paint.
Shit. Wait. He used up the last of his shanix on the syk. Bought enough of it to die ten times over, here’s hoping. Fuck, why did he do that? Because he wanted to be sure that it’d work? Newsflash, idiot, five times over is good enough. What he gets for not planning ahead.
Optics burning, he starts scratching at his chassis instead, scrape-scrape-sccccrape-ing a diagonal line for one half of the X instead. Stupid, dumbass Rodimus, can’t think to save a few fucking scraps because he’s in such a hurry to die. The paint would be way funnier. It would have been a really good fucking joke, and now instead they’re going to find him with an anorexic little letter composed of what some bots might consider ‘self-harm marks’. It’ll be thin and grey and stupid instead of a big, silly pirate map X. Fucking ridiculous.
Cleansing fluid blurs his vision as he digs the line deeper. Fat teardrops fall onto the thin scratches, and isn’t that pathetic? They’ll find him marked up and tearstained, and worse, they’ll probably think that he was crying because he was killing himself or whatever, when really, he’s just fucking pissed that this great joke he thought of right now is ruined because of a grand old zero in his bank account. Nobody will laugh at all, it’s not going to be funny, it’s going to be sad, not even sad like, depressing, just sad like sad. Sad like dumb. Sad like the way mechs look at you when you butt into a conversation a little too late, and you’re a touch overcharged and think you’re the belle of the ball, so you try and talk like the others are talking, but you’re talking too much and they’re laughing too little. Sad like that.
No. No way. He can’t go out like that, he just—he can’t. He’s not dying without at least one fucking person getting the joke.
“Hey,” Drift says, after three rings, which is probably a normal amount of time to wait before answering your commline. “Is it bad to say that I didn’t actually think you’d call?”
Rodimus sniffs, big and wet and gross. His vocalizer hiccups. “Hey,” he croaks.
“Wait, are—” He sounds sharp now. “Roddy, what’s going on?”
“M’pissed off,” he mumbles, smudging a useless hand through the teartracks that cut down his cheeks. “I can’t buy any paint.”
“Wh—paint? What?”
“For the fuckin’,” his tongue fumbles in his mouth, fat and dumb against his teeth. “The pirate map. The X. I spent all my fuckin’ cash and I can’t buy any paint.”
Drift goes silent for a few moments. Rodimus takes the opportunity to try and clean up again, but his optics have apparently decided that now is a great time to leak and leak and leak. He’ll be lucky if his faceplate is dry by the time that they bury him. When Drift finally decides to speak again, his voice is hesitant, slow and careful like the very words are padded with tissue. “Have you,” he starts, then stops, then starts again, “are you at a party?”
“Fuck no,” he snorts. “What kinda…stupid goddamn party that would be, what kinda parties are you goin’ to?”
“So you’re alone right now?”
“You’re here,” he points out. That’s obvious. “Needed someone to get the joke.”
“The joke,” Drift repeats. “About…the pirate map.”
“Mh-hm.”
There’s a bunch of typing sounds coming from Drift’s side. Does he seriously need to look it up? They spent how long looking for the Knights of Cybertron again? He can’t not get the joke. It wasn’t a pirate map, specifically, but still… “Roddy, are you—are you still on the Exitus?”
Rodimus’s plating prickles. This is starting to feel weirdly interrogative. “Can you lay off and just laugh at the fucking joke?” he snaps, giving up on the X on his chassis in favor of the unopened syk in his lap. “It’s a good—a good joke.” Drift used to take syk, a long time ago. Maybe Rodimus should ask him how it feels. “Might not feel the same, with the other shit,” he mumbles while his arm panel snaps open, because he remembers that he’s still got the other speeders waning in his system. Maybe Drift never doubled up.
“What?”
“Did you ever double up?”
“Double…where are you right now?”
“Did you ever,” Rodimus repeats, enunciating each word clearly this time, “double up?”
“Roddy—”
“Primus, alright, I get it,” he mutters, and oh, wow, his voice sounds really fucking thick. Very clogged. Everything feels hot and claustrophobic. “You don’t wanna—wanna tell me, okay, ‘kay, I get it.”
“Rodimus.” Drift sounds stern now, cool and controlled, which has Rodimus clamping a hand over his mouth in an effort to muffle a loud sob. Why is he being so fucking mean? “What did you take?”
“Syk,” he whispers through his palm, because now he has. It doesn’t feel like much of anything yet—oh, hm, wait. Okay. There’s a warmth spreading from his arm where he’d plugged in the first chip, a sickly sweet haze that envelops the sticky pain of rejection at the edge in Drift’s voice. “S—something else, um…a speeder, I can’t…”
“You took syk?”
“Yeah.” He blinks, and it takes ten full nanokliks for him to realize that actually, he’d just closed his optics without reopening them. Weird. Feels like he can see right through. X-ray vision. Big red X. “Just now. Did you ever double up?”
“Please tell me where you are. Are you in the Dead End?”
“Won’t change anything,” he mumbles, plugging in the second chip. “Just wanted…didn’t wanna write a note or whatever, s’stupid, so you—you gotta tell Thunders the joke.”
He’s not sure how fast syk enters the system, but the warmth is full-bodied now. It’s kind of hot, actually—his spark feels like it’s spinning overtime, and his processor could be smoking, for all he knows. Isn’t syk supposed to make you feel good? He wanted to feel good before he died. He just wants to feel good. Right now, he still feels like shit, only faster.
Syk wasn’t very popular in Nyon. Not that circuit boosters or speeders themselves weren’t common, they were—Rodimus remembers seeing mechs every other decacycle face-down in their own unprocessed energon, sprawled out grey and sparkless on the street corners. Lots of mechs took to choosing between the high and the end. Syk in particular though, that one was hard to get around there. Any syk that did end up in Nyon cost ten times what it would’ve in the Dead End, so a lot of bots didn’t consider it worth the price unless they were already hooked on it or were looking to die. Or, in special cases, looking for the courage to kill.
Rodimus doesn’t really feel like killing anyone else, thankfully, but he does feel like slotting the third chip in. Maybe the third one will stop the room from tilting, and finally bring on that euphoria that everyone talks about.
“...just want to help you,” shit, wait, is Drift talking? “If you’re talking about what I think you’re talking about—”
“What do you think I’m talking about?” Rodimus interrupts. He marvels at how conversational his voice sounds to his own audials.
Silence.
Wait, no. Not silence. There is sound on Drift’s side, but Rodimus can’t really tell what it is. Sounds crowded. Makes his audials hurt.
“Drift?”
“Here. I’m here.”
“Will you tell him?” Looking down, he can see that the X he’d made is actually angled kind of weird, and looks more like a plus sign than anything. “Them. Whoever it is that comes. Looks fuckin’ stupid, should’ve just stolen some paint…”
“I—” There’s a car horn. Someone is shouting.
Hold on.
“Are you driving?” Rodimus tries to stand up, which leads to him falling face-first into the table.
“Rodim—”
“No,” he says, oh, fuck, “no, no, stop. Whatever—whatever you think you’re doing, stop. Stop it.” Everything is spinning. Spark spinning, processor spinning, room spinning. His head fucking hurts and he’s still got like, five chips of syk to take. “Stop.”
“You know I can’t do that. Ro—”
Rodimus hangs up. Drift is fucking—Primus. Okay. He should’ve never called him. Bad plan. Stupid idea. He doesn’t even think the joke’s funny, should’ve called Whirl or…no, he’s in jail still. Someone else. Who? Off topic. Drift is coming. Maybe. He’s trying to stop him, which should’ve been fucking obvious, obviously, so he’s—he’s coming, and Rodimus can’t let that happen.
The sun whites out the world as he blunders out of the motel, unsure of his destination but dead fucking certain that it’s anywhere but here. Panic rapidly turns the heat from before into ice. How fast can Drift drive? Where does Drift even live? He doesn’t remember, can’t remember anything, syk is bullshit, isn’t he supposed to be like—like hyperaware, or something? Energized and happy and ready for anything? Right now, all he seems to be is dizzy.
The street chops up into threes, and he picks a random one to go down, lilting left as he plugs the third chip in. Maybe he won’t get to die laid up in a motel room. Fine. But he is going out, one way or another. Drift can find him sprawled on the sidewalk instead. Big fucking X, X marks the spot, cartoon x’s for optics. Dammit, that’s good too. He should’ve thought of that before. Too late. Primus, fuck, Drift is coming, Rodimus doesn’t even know what street he’s on—
Time gets weird around four kliks in.
There’s a building. Funny colored, can’t tell which one. Just. Odd color for a building. Some bots next to a lamp post. One of them bumps into him, or—he bumps into them? Their fault. Fuck those bots, getting in his way, stupid assholes. He thinks he might yell at them.
No, wait, god, that’s horrible. Guilt. Very guilty. He’s sobbing at the light and someone asks him what’s wrong. There’s a syk chip hanging out of his arm and it burns, real fucking bad, is he not supposed to keep it in that long? The mech’s voice is too kind to bear, and Rodimus runs from it.
Knees hurt a lot. Keep falling on them. His hands are all scraped up from how many times he’s pushed himself up from the ground. Everything is blurry and his throat hurts so, so badly. He wants to go home. He wants to die. At some point, he thinks he’s saying one of those things aloud, but he’s not sure. Not even sure if he’s actually talking to anyone when he allegedly says it.
“Fuck me,” someone swears, hands on his arms, cool against his clammy plating. He hangs his helm against their chest and screams, and when he tries to pull away, their grip on him tightens. “It’s alright. Roddy, it’s gonna be alright.”
No. No, that’s definitely not true. He wants to go home. He wants to die.
He wants…
He just wants.
____
[SYSTEMS DIAGNOSTIC CHECKING…
OPTIC_L: FUNCTIONAL, OFFLINE
OPTIC_R: FUNCTIONAL, OFFLINE
AUDIAL_L: FUNCTIONAL, OFFLINE
AUDIAL_R: FUNCTIONAL, OFFLINE
VOCALIZER: FUNCTIONAL, OFFLINE
FUEL_PUMP: FUNCTIONAL, ONLINE
FUEL_TANK_1: FUNCTIONAL, ONLINE
FUEL_TANK_2: FUNCTIONAL, ONLINE
TRANSFORMATION_COG: FUNCTIONAL, ROOT_MODE
SPARK: ROTATION OFF-BALANCE 4.7%, SUB-OPTIMAL, STABLE
FUEL LEVEL: 62%
CHARGE LEVEL: 54%
SYSTEMS STATUS: FUNCTIONAL
INITIALIZING FULL SYSTEM REBOOT…
REBOOT COMPLETE.
POWERING ON.]
Rodimus wakes up, and that’s only the first problem.
The second, far less distressing but significantly more alarming problem is the violent wave of nausea that sweeps through his fuel tanks the moment his optics come online. Bright light jackhammers through his processor for a split second before he shuts his optics right back off, but the ensuing darkness does little to stave off the purge that he knows is coming. At least the black doesn’t make things any worse.
A migraine that must have already been there pushes two fingers behind each optic, as if trying to pop them directly out of his helm. When he grits his teeth against the pain, however, the tension in his jaw increases the pressure tenfold; he’s powerless to stop the wretched little whimper that escapes his vocalizer. Oh, god, he thinks, and the mere fact that he’s thinking at all cracks open the cavity in his chest, the empty hole he’s haphazardly patched up over the past decacycle with booze and drugs and the promise of a perfect plan. His spark is filled with cement, and he can’t breathe. Oh god.
He’s not dead. He’s not fucking dead. Much of his last decacycle is murky, borderline unreachable, but the one thing he knows for sure is that there wasn’t supposed to be an after. No more emptiness, no more bitching and whining and crying, and no more waiting for something he knows he’ll never have again. No more distracting himself from a truth that had become ever-clearer the longer he’d spent on the Exitus: nothing is worth it anymore. He reached the peak of his life a long time ago, and he’s never getting it back. Trying to replicate it is pointless. Deluding himself with ships and stars has just been putting off the inevitable. So, after a final straw had been placed upon his back, he’d decided to finally be proactive for once in the thousands of orns since his life had ended and face reality head-on, finish the job. Finish the fucking job.
Guess he can add that plan to his endless list of failures.
“Rodimus?” a voice asks, and fear lances straight through his spark before recognition actually clicks. It’s not Drift—he doesn’t remember much of what happened at the end there, but he knows that he’d called Drift. He knows that Drift was coming for him.
So why the fuck is First Aid here?
“I know you’re awake,” he says, not unkindly, but the way he says it is so distinctly Ratchet that Rodimus has to bite his lip to stop it from wobbling. “And I also know that you have a nasty helmache right now. Nausea as well?”
Helpless to do anything else, Rodimus nods.
There’s the scratching sound of a pen on a tablet screen before First Aid continues. “As I thought. We managed to purge your system of everything that you took, but that hangover’s going to last you well into the day. Not to mention the withdrawal.”
“How—” His tongue feels tacky in his mouth, gummy like energon’s dried up in the little bits of plating. “How did you—”
“Find you? To be honest, you didn’t really make it hard. You’re a little too famous to not be noticed acting like that on the streets.”
Acting like what? He doesn’t remember. There was a motel, and it was quiet, but Drift was coming…Rodimus had left, hadn’t he? He’d gone outside. Fuck, he’s even stupider than he thought. Should’ve just used a blaster. Why didn't he bring a blaster?
First Aid snaps his fingers, and Rodimus realizes with a start that it's probably not for the first time. “With me?” he asks, and Rodimus nods. “Good. I need you with me for this.”
“Oh, yay,” Rodimus deadpans, “there’s a ‘this’.”
“Obviously there’s a ‘this’. You don’t get to try and fragging kill yourself without there being a ‘this’.”
Wincing, Rodimus ducks his chin deep into his collar plating. He doesn’t like hearing him say it out loud. “I wasn’t trying to—” he starts, then hesitates, uncertain both of what he’d said himself to Drift, and what Drift may have said to First Aid. Something’s telling him that this is not a lie he’ll be able to weasel his way out of. “Your bedside manner is awful, you know that?”
Awful and familiar. Pull it together, Rodimus.
First Aid’s visor dims, optics narrowing behind the glass. “Sorry, captain. No quips or distractions for this one. After an exam, we’re gonna have to talk.”
Fuck.