Sisyphus
by lint. zzzz
Summary: Sideswipe crosses the line. Sunstreaker is a good brother. Roughly G1-ish.
Warnings: Some violence, giant alien robot swearing, lengthy first-person exposition. Probably not the best story to read to your boyfriend's eight-year old, as my editor/proofreader found out.
Notes: see end.
Disclaimer: I own no copyrighted characters contained herein. (As if I'd want responsibility for these guys. Shyeah, right.)
Length: 5589
I'm in our quarters, getting the last of the mud off my shins, when I feel Sideswipe cross the line. The last battle had us slagging it out over some measly little solar station in the desert, in the middle of a monsoon, and I wasn't about to set foot in public until my paint was in a fit state to be seen. Sides hadn't given a frag about his own bodywork, just went to join everyone else in the rec room, like every other time after a battle. I don't see the point of celebrating every time we get our afts handed to us fighting in defense of some random backwater messy organic planet; it's not like it's going to matter in the long run.
He didn't ask if I was going to come along. That should have been my first clue.
There's still a bunch of dirt jammed under my ankle plating, but it'll wait. I think a couple bots try to talk to me on the way to the rec room, although they know I'm not about to stop and chat, not with them. They'd probably be scared out of their puny little processors if I did, anyway. Most times I'd be just as likely to rip out their vocal components and shove the sparking remains through their intakes, because so little of what they say matters. And then they'll whine and complain, and say that I hate them. I don't, really. There are very few bots whom I actually hate. I may think they're stupid and inconsequential and that they don't matter, but I don't hate them.
The rec room's packed, the crowd spilling out into the hall, noisy and boisterous and infinitely glad to be online and intact. It doesn't matter. Sides is at the far end of the room, at a table with half a dozen other mechs, playing some random betting game. He's got the largest pile of credits by far, and nobody else seems to mind. They're all laughing, and overcharged to the gills, and my brother's the leader of the pack, the slagger.
I stalk over to the table, and if there's a few bots who don't see me coming and I'm a little rough getting them out of my way, it doesn't matter. Sides knows I'm coming. He looks up before I get there, that slag-eating grin plastered across his faceplates. It's so much worse when he's having fun, and everyone acts like it's not fair that I drag him away.
But it doesn't matter. They don't matter. I can't even tell who else is at the table; it's just me and Sides, and I know he knows why I'm here. He starts to say something, but I cut him off before he can even get a sound out. "Can it."
Again, the grin, with the pleading optics. But they're too bright, and I wonder how nobody else notices. "One more round, Sunny. You want to join in?"
He knows what I'm going to say. Sideswipe, I tell him over our private commlink. Time to go.
His expression suddenly turns sour; he knows what's coming. Only thing to be seen is if it's going to be the easy way or the hard way. He smirks at me and turns back to the table. "Looks like somebody's a party pooper."
It's going to be the hard way. He's my brother; I should know better than to expect anything different. I grab him by the arm and one of the sensory projections on his helm and start dragging. The table gets knocked askew somehow, and the other mechs start protesting, but I couldn't give a flying slagheap. They've all seen this happen before, anyway. It all must seem random to them; he'll be having fun, and I'll come in and pull him away. Doesn't happen all the time, maybe once or twice a vorn. I heard someone say once that I was jealous, that I wanted all the attention for myself.
Doesn't matter what they think. I'm trying to be careful, but Sides is flailing as I push him out of the rec room in front of me, knocking into all the other bots he can and playing it off like it's me causing it. "Fraggit, Sunny, you're such a stick in the aft!"
I don't like human slang, and he knows it. It's just so transitory and...organic, for lack of a better word. Organic bits and parts and bodily functions, and none of it matters to us. I wrestle Sideswipe out the rec room door, and ease up my grip in the hope that he'll come along quietly now that we're out of view of most of the crowd.
No such luck. He grins wickedly at me and says, "Catch me if you can." Then he transforms and speeds off.
I swear and drop into alt mode to chase him. He's accelerating the whole way out of the Ark, cutting turns so wide he's scraping quarter panels against the corridor walls just for the tiny bit faster he can pull out of them. And then we're out, into the late afternoon summer sun, bouncing and jolting down the dirt access road faster than any Earth Lamborghini would ever dream of going on that surface. I take a moment to comm Ratchet and let him know what's going on.
He says he saw, he was at the party, and asks when he should be expecting the red idiot, and in how many pieces.
I tell him to take his best guess, that I just followed Sideswipe onto the freeway at twice the local speed limit.
There's a pause, and I know that he wants to shout at me, but instead all he says is that Sides isn't answering his comm, as if I didn't know that already. He tells me to be careful, and call back when I've caught him. I close out the link and focus on chasing down my glitch-headed brother, who's now zooming down the road at close to two hundred miles an hour, swerving and swooping around what little local traffic there is. I know he can handle those speeds, can handle a lot faster than that, even in the state he's in, but if even one of the humans in their little steel-and-plastic econocars deviates even a centimeter away from their current trajectory, they're going to end up as an ugly organic smear on the pavement. It won't hurt us, not permanently, anyway, but the punishment Prime's put on harming humans is insanely high, and that's not something I want to even think about.
Besides, I just finished polishing my armor, at least most of it. Last thing I want is to have to bang out dents from something as stupid as this.
I can't catch him. I can barely keep up, and I've got the feeling that there's more than just a cube too much of high-grade involved. There's a jittery, twitchy thrum of excitement in my spark, but it's not mine; it's Sideswipe, he's infecting me, making it fun to be racing down the pavement at a third the speed of sound, dodging cars without a care. I know we've passed a couple cop cars, but I doubt they've seen anything more than a pair of red and yellow blurs. That alone is enough to identify us, unfortunately. Local law enforcement knows that any cases of unidentified vehicles displaying gross misconduct get forwarded to the local giant alien robots, and discipline will get handed out from there. I'll probably be looking at a few nights in the brig and restriction to base for the next Earth month, and Sides the same, once he gets out of Ratchet's clutches.
I've got to stop him first, though. I shove away the gleeful paranoia in the back of my mind, and concentrate on catching up to my brother.
Just around the next bend there's a tractor-trailer in the slow lane, with a steady stream of cars passing on the left. I manage to box Sides in behind the truck in a cloud of tire smoke; we're on a valley overpass, and there's nowhere for him to go. I open our private comm line as I crowd him into the guardrail, hoping he'll actually listen to me, for once. Get off the road, now. This has gone far enough.
No response. The guardrail comes to an end as the ground rises to meet the road once more, and as soon as he's cleared the concrete railing, Sides heads offroad, rumbling down the steep embankment. He's not having fun anymore, I can tell, and it serves him right. I don't want to even think about the rocks pinging off my undercarriage and all the organic slag that's getting caught in the seams of my armor as I follow him. And not to mention that I just waxed, and it's probably got half a ton of dirt stuck to it now, since it hasn't had time to set.
Sides has come to the bottom of the hill without tipping over, amazingly enough, and zips off towards a stand of trees in a cloud of dust. I have no clue what he's up to; it's not like he can hide. Any bot's sensors could find a large mass of Cybertronian alloy in amongst a heap of pure organic matter, and beyond that, we're twins. I could find him half a galaxy away with all my sensors offline, just from the pull of his spark.
I shift out of alt mode before I head into the trees. Finding him is no problem, but he can play nasty just as well as me; just ask any mech who's been on the receiving end of his pranks. I'm barely out of sight of the road when he tackles me, shoving me into a huge old pine that creaks ominously under our combined weight. "I got off the road, didn't I?" Sides grinds out, pissed off and petulant at the same time. But I'm more than a bit angry at him myself, and throw him off my back. He stumbles backwards, tripping into a smaller tree that splinters underneath him.
There's tree sap ground into scratches on my chestplate, and I have to remind myself that he's my brother, and he's not in a rational state of mind right now. He's my brother, and I really don't want to beat the slag out of him, but if I have to, I will. He's getting up off the ground as I untangle myself from the tree, and I don't even get a flicker of warning before he swings the tree he fell on at me. I hear glass shattering as it knocks me back across a boulder, and I slide all the way across the rock before falling off a small cliff headfirst and backwards.
Faceplant, into a thick bog of mud and ferns and who-knows-what organic muck. A good dozen error messages pop up on my headsup, most from my right arm, which is somehow twisted around in a manner that it definitely isn't supposed to twist and embedded in the trunk of a long-dead tree that had been vertical up until a few moments ago. I wrench my arm out of the remains of the tree, overriding as many of the error messages as I can, and scramble back up the hill beside the rock.
Sides is just standing there, the broken tree lying at his feet, a stricken expression on his faceplates. But he doesn't say anything, just turns and drops into alt mode at the sight of me stalking towards him, covered in mud and scrapes and one arm useless. I can't transform to follow him, something in my arm is pushing a critical error into the process, and all I can think to do is throw myself on top of Sideswipe's alt mode before he can make a break for it. And then we're heading deeper into the stand of trees; I'm gripping his roof with my knees and beating on his front suspension with my good hand, because I won't be able to hold on for long and it's the only way I can think to make him stop. Finally something gives way in his left front wheelwell and he shudders to a halt, slewing sideways into a half dozen saplings. I'm still on top of him as he transforms, and now instead of dealing with a Lamborghini trying to buck me off, I'm wrestling down a squirmy, fully-articulated robot. "Get off me," he hisses, trying to avoid getting moss and pine needles stuck in his mouth components.
Not gonna happen. I slam his head into the ground and fumble around the bottom of his helm, trying to find his emergency access panel. He screams and flips us over, swinging his elbow back into the broken glass of my canopy, but he's not getting rid of me that easily. My legs are wrapped around his waist and I've slung my good arm around his neck, and nothing short of offlining's going to make me let go. I can feel how hot his systems are running, how his engine's racing as he tries to break my grip, and the only thing that I can think to say is a fragging stupid piece of Earth slang. "Primus, Sides, chill out!"
"You're gonna turn me off," he says, and I can feel his panic leaking across my mind as he grinds me deeper into the forest floor with his struggling; the motion is sawing a chunk of rock across a major fuel line that my earlier encounter with the boulder exposed, and it's getting closer to breaking with each movement.
"I don't want to have to," I tell him, and I mean it. Dropping a mech into stasis by their emergency access switch is hard on the processors, and from experience, I know that it'll mess me up even more than it does him. "You've gone far enough."
He doesn't have anything to say to that, just a wordless grunt as he slams the both of us back into the ground. The rock breaks through my fuel line; I can feel the wetness spreading underneath me, and know that I've got to get a handle on the situation sooner rather than later. If Sideswipe were thinking right, he'd know there was something wrong, more than just component damage, just from the change in spark resonance. I ping Ratchet with our coordinates, because I'll be damned if I'm letting Sides go now, and as much as I hate to admit it, I could really use the help.
"What was it this time?" I manage to get out, between Sides grinding my back further onto the rock and him trying to pry my arm off his throat. Primus knows where he gets half the stuff; last time it was Earth vehicle fuel, and diesel at that. He tried to weasel his way out of that one, telling me it was farm-fresh morning-dew organic biodiesel and not that liquid dinosaur slag, but in the end it fragged up his fuel system all the same, and he spent a whole Earth week hooked up to an external filter in medbay with Ratchet using his name as a swearword the entire time.
"I didn't do anything wrong!" he shouts, and he nearly manages to get my arm off him before I lock my shoulder and elbow joints; he'll have to actually break it to get it to move now. I can feel the gears straining as he pushes harder and harder, and it suddenly occurs to me that this was a really stupid move, because he's desperate enough to actually do it and I'm just going to end up with two nonfunctional arms instead of just one. But I don't even have time to override the lock, I just don't have enough power to put behind the commands, and the sounds my elbow and shoulder make as the gears strip echo like gunshots through the trees. I see a flash of white suddenly, sensory overload, and frantically bat down each and every error message that clamors for attention.
Sideswipe's rolled off me, he's somehow managed to get my legs away from his midsection, and he's on his hands and knees beside me, engine revving erratically. "I didn't do anything wrong," he says again, and despite the heat coming off him, I can tell he's almost to the point where he's calmed enough to listen, amazingly enough.
Too bad I don't have enough energy left to talk him down.
He sits down beside me, head in his hands. "You can't just let me be, can you?" I can feel his disappointment more than hear it, a stark blackness spreading across my half of our spark, like ink clouding water. "Every time, it's like this. You can't stand for me to be, without the we." That's not it; it's so far off the mark it's laughable and he knows it, but it hurts all the same, and all I can do is tell myself that it's not Sides talking right now, it's whatever's running in his system and pushing words out his vocalizer, into the air and into me. He seems to wilt then, putting a hand to the ground as if to brace himself upright, and then it finally is him again. He's brought himself back, and all it took was running across half the state of Oregon and beating the slag out of me. "Sunny?" he says, peering down at me, and he lifts his hand and examines the dirt clinging to it, as if it's suddenly occurred to him that the dampness isn't from water.
Every time, it's like this. Every time he'll be repentant and sorry and say he's going to change, but it never happens. I know he means it when he says it, too, I can feel his sincerity; nobody's that good a liar, spark-to-spark. And every time, I'll trust it's the time he's come clean, until something like this happens again. Every single fragging time.
"Sunny?" He's looking down at me, horrified and regretful and half a dozen other things I want to believe are true. "I've hurt you."
Yeah, Sides, you did. I've offlined all my pain sensors, and I still feel torn in two.
"I didn't mean to." He sounds just as broken as I feel, and good for him. He should. I'm staring up at the sky through tree branches, from a me-shaped indentation in the forest floor, lying in my own bodily fluids and unable to move, and he's the reason why.
The faint sound of sirens in the distance, and out of the corner of my optic, I see Sides turn to look. I see my chance, and channel all available power into motor processes just for one moment. After all, I don't need optic data, don't need sensors to tell where he is. My foot connects with the back of his head, and I feel more than hear him collapse onto the broken glass in my chest, and his stasis condemns me in coldness.
So heavy, so cold. I remember the colors of the sunset above me, the texture of the clouds, light bending through the humid, organic atmosphere, and hold the data in the forefront of my processors. I feel my own systems shutting down in response to Sideswipe and my own trauma, locking down tighter than a drum. The light, the color, the cold. Remember this.
Remember.
Remember.
Re–
Reboot.
I focus on the status reports that are scrolling across my headsup: fuel system stable and pressurized within normal parameters, low at twenty-seven percent operational capacity but rising slowly; systems integrity showing half a dozen errors, including critical errors from both arms; processors all functional; communications all functional; motor functions overridden; sensory network mostly functional, data from pain receptors routed to an external relay point.
Sideswipe. He's still in stasis; it's like shouting in a huge, empty room and not hearing an echo. Disorienting, cold, lonely.
"You overreacted."
Thanks, Ratchet. First thing I want to hear when I come online. I don't overreact, and he knows it. I tell him this, and he just snorts at me. A large pair of tweezers are waved in front of my optics. "I should just let you dig glass and wood splinters out of your own fragging chestplate, then. But wait–you have no arms. I have to rebuild them first. I should have Teletraan rescan you and your brother with street sweepers as alt modes; at least it'll limit the high-speed chases to twenty-five miles an hour..."
I let Ratchet's vitriol wash over me; I can tell Sideswipe's on a berth about a body-length away to my right, a cold, unechoing piece of we. My mind dwells on it, like picking at a sore. Times like this, the link festers between us; we'll be angry and sorry and hopeful, but in the end, we can't change, either one of us. It's a tug-of-war, with our soul as the rope and our selves as the pullers, and there's no more ground to lose.
I interrupt Ratchet's tirade, and ask about Sideswipe.
The sound of the tweezers clattering down on a metal surface. "Better than you, that's for sure." Then he steps into my field of view and I can see just how angry he is, angry enough to not be swearing blazing blue murder at me. "Sunstreaker. You kicked him in the emergency access panel."
I reply that I know exactly where I kicked him, that my arms weren't working at that point.
"That's a very sensitive collection of circuits. You could have permanently damaged him."
But I didn't. I knew exactly what I was doing. He knows us better than that.
Ratchet sighs, and picks up the tweezers again, jabbing at a piece of something that's not supposed to be embedded in my chest. "It'll take me at least an orn to rewire it. I should just give your arms to Wheeljack to fix." That's supposed to be a threat, even though I know Jack's a pretty decent repair mech when he's not trying to improve on the specs, and that Ratchet would never reattach anything if it didn't live up to his standards. A hand-length sliver of wood, with some bark and pine needles still attached, is shoved in front of my optics. "Want to explain this, you glitched idiot?"
Ah, there's the Ratchet we all know and love. I tell him that Sides hit me with a tree.
"From the state of your arm, looks like he hit you with a few of them." He's quiet then, every so often waving an exceptionally impressive splinter in my faceplates, because he knows all this organic slag annoys me. It's got to be nearly a quarter-joor later before he speaks again, when he's down to the smaller glass fragments. "You overreacted."
I didn't, I repeat.
"I checked his systems. Copper sulfate's a standard fuel additive; it's not a controlled substance, not even close. In fact, with all the fragging organisms floating around in this atmosphere, I'd even go so far as to recommend it once in a while, just to wipe out any fungal infections before they start."
It's not what it was, it's how he reacted. He crossed the line. The response is automatic; it's the exact same thing I've told him, a hundred times over. We've had this discussion before, the first time I had to bring Sides in when we were transferred to this unit. It's the line between choice and compulsion, the line Sideswipe can't see until he's on the wrong side, when he's someone else and can't do anything about it.
Ratchet just harrumphs at me and drags a vacuum over to the berth. He knows better than to argue with me on this. "Prime wants to talk to you," he says, running the vacuum over my exposed midsection to get any microscopic pieces of debris that he might have missed.
Good for Prime, I reply.
"You might want to consider telling him."
I don't have an answer to that. What am I supposed to do, go up to Optimus Prime, the virtuous, glorious leader of the Autobots, and let him know that one of his best frontline soldiers is a hard-coded addict, and has been for however many millennia we've been serving under his command? Maybe he does deserve to know, and I'm surprised nobody's figured it out yet, but I couldn't bear the way everyone else would treat us when word got around. It would only be a matter of time, because if I told Prime, he'd let the rest of the command element know as a matter of tactical responsibility, and that's too many bots to keep a secret. I don't care what everyone thinks of me; they already dislike me, and I don't give a frag about them. But they like Sides. They think he's friendly and funny and a damned good mech to have watching your back in a fight, all of which is true, and I can't imagine how much it would hurt him to have that all tainted, twisted into something unrecognizeable.
"He's going to be here in a couple breems," Ratchet tells me casually, as he fiddles about with my protocols. "I'm cancelling the override on your motor functions and handing back control of your pain receptors, and you're going to tell me if there's anything I overlooked. Better to find it now than in the middle of the next battle."
Pain, immediate and overwhelming and sharp, coming from my chest and arm sockets, nothing like the raw ache in my mind where Sideswipe should be. I turn down the gain on the sensors almost to nil, until I can do something other than just lie there and whimper. I look up to see Ratchet standing over me, arms crossed and frowning. I grimace back as I say that he could have at least warned me.
"Hurts, huh?" The flat glare he levels at me is nearly equal to my own. "Maybe next time you'll learn not to let your brother beat the slag out of you."
Much as I hate to admit it, he's got a right to be pissed. Not as much as me, though. I tell him that next time I'll just have to beat the slag out of Sides first. Even up the score, if nothing else.
"Or maybe neither of you will hurt each other, and you'll give him a chance to come down here on his own," Ratchet says, and I can tell how angry and frustrated he is. Angry, because the injuries we cause each other are stupid and pointless. Frustrated, because there's something wrong with one of his patients that he can't fix.
Primus, I wish he could fix it. And I wish I could trust Sides enough that I don't have to chase him down when he has a problem.
The door to medbay slides open, and Ratchet excuses himself from our private room with one last glare over his shoulder. I can hear him talking to the Prime outside, and manage to lever myself to standing. I may not care if others like me, but I'm still a soldier, and even though I'm missing both arms and a good bit of armor, I'm going to be facing my commanding officer and I've still got a shred of dignity left. There's nothing I can do about the ruin of my paintjob, though; it's a seven-layer process and it'll take about an Earth week for the repaint to cure. I'm staring at the rock-scratches running the length of my legs and thinking there's probably still dirt stuck in my ankle from the battle yesterday when Ratchet leads the Prime in. He stays standing by the door, unrelentingly and uncharacteristically quiet, and just lets the Prime lay into me.
I force myself to stand there and listen; usually the Prime is pretty levelheaded, but I can tell this time he's about to blow a smokestack. Apparently there were three car accidents directly related to our chase, one with minor injuries, and the area where we ended up was private property, and the landowner is demanding biohazard reparations due to the fact that I leaked all over the place. It doesn't matter; it's no worse than normal. Just me and Sides being irresponsible aftheads, blah blah blah. And then he asks me if I have anything to say for myself, to explain our actions.
That's not normal. Usually we just end up reporting to Prowl for punishment, since the Prime has enough to do dealing with the paperwork we cause. Prowl's a stubborn glitch, but he's logical, and at least we know where we stand with him. The Prime's more passionate, for lack of a better word, and I don't want to say the wrong thing and get us into any more trouble than we already are.
I glance over at Ratchet, trying to find some clue on what to say. His faceplates reveal nothing; no anger, no sympathy, no help. I know what he would do, what he wants me to do, and I'm too tired to think of anything better.
But there's no way I can do it. I can't face the Prime and make the words come out of my vocalizer. There's nothing left for me to do; I'm backed into a corner, no way out.
I lock optics with Ratchet from across the room. I hear myself speak: Tell him. The words are out before I can think better of it, because there's nothing else I can do. There are things I can't say, that I can't explain. And again, my voice: I think I'm speaking for both of us right now.
The Prime's got something blustery and pragmatic to say to that, but I can't hear it. All that reaches my audio processors is Ratchet asking me, far too calmly, what I want him to tell.
Everything, I say.
Tell him everything.
It's all slow-motion then; Ratchet's dragging the Prime out of the room and into his office, and they're both talking at the same time. I can't understand any of it, it's all a haze of sound in my audio receptors. It doesn't matter. I go over to Sideswipe's berth and sit down, avoiding the cables connecting him to the code analyzer that's wiping the virus from his active system, and lean my forehead against his. This close, I can feel his spark thrum in time with mine, even through stasis, and the aching blankness where he should be recedes, if just a little.
I think about the colors of the sky, seen through branches, and the way of the we, when Sideswipe's all right. About the mural of the Iaconian Lyceum from the Golden Age, which has been in every place we've called our own, scratched into walls and painted and drawn with bodily fluids. Sides said he wanted to go there once, before he knew what it was, and that's how I feel now. If I had arms, I'd etch it into the walls here, so Sides could see it when he came out of stasis, but last time I did that, Ratchet nearly took my head off with an arc welder.
I am not thinking about what Ratchet's telling the Prime right now. He'll dress it up in fancy terminology and make it sound more complicated than it is, but in the end it'll be the same: my brother's a junkie, always has been, since before he even onlined, and there's nothing to do about it but reel him in when he screws up, over and over again.
Nothing to do but sit and wait and listen to Sideswipe's spark and think about the organic sunset, transitory and always different, but always there.
The door to the room opens. I can't look up; can't do anything but sit there, with my head pressed to my brother's, and wait for the Pit to open up below us.
Footsteps, and a hand pressed gently to the remains of my shoulder. "Sunstreaker," the Prime begins.
I shrug off his hand as best I can, and say that we don't want anyone's fragging pity.
There's a long pause, and he's just standing there behind me. Not talking, not moving. Finally, he says, "When you are released from the medbay, the two of you are to report to Prowl for punishment detail." And then he leaves, the door sliding shut behind him.
Is that it? Really? The biggest secret of our lives, and it's just business as usual? I can't decide if I want to thank the Prime or hit him. But hitting Primes has always been more of Sides' specialty, and I'm not about to take it away from him. It doesn't matter, anyway.
I lay down next to my brother, being careful not to jostle either of our damaged areas any more than necessary. It's an easier fit than normal, what with me being armless, and as I lay there I try to forget everything that doesn't matter, and focus on what does. Hard not to, he's laying right next to me and hogging the fragging berth.
And swear to Primus, if Wheeljack wires my arms to explode, Ratchet's gonna get it.
Author's notes: This one wrote itself. Literally. I kinda just waggled my fingers at the keyboard, and this is what happened. Technically, it's a waaaay-after-the-fact sidestory to an origin fic I'm writing, but I thought it was complete enough to stand on its own. Yes, I know junkie!Swipe has been done before. Yes, I know a lot of people hate first person present. Deal with it, or don't read it, simple as that. That being said, thank you for reading.
Geek notes: This was typed entirely on my 10-inch laptop computer; it took four days, in the spaces between working two jobs and school, and then another three months to edit it to my satisfaction and get the nads to post it somewhere other people could read.