Sideswipe

Sideswipe wasn't feeling good. Again.

He tried to ignore it but it was becoming too much to ignore now. The rust had started to stop a lot of his movements. He could barely move his arm at all now without breaking something more than he'd already broken it. The rust had tried to stop his movements before but he just broke through it and ended up breaking off parts of his joints in the process.

He didn't want to completely lose his arm so he'd suffer with not moving it for now.

Sideswipe really hoped someone found a cure soon. First Aid was supposed to be finding a cure or even just a way to remove the rust and if someone didn't find something soon, Sideswipe was afraid he'd end up cutting the rusted parts off of himself.

He was also starting to feel the effects of staying in his hab constantly. He didn't know how much time had passed. It felt like months. He was hearing things that weren't there and wasn't able to properly recharge because he always heard someone yelling just outside his door.

It was always someone different, yelling at him and getting mad at him for causing the disease. The first time he heard the voices outside his door, it was Prowl yelling at him for causing so much trouble and giving everyone extra work and telling him that he deserved to feel miserable. The second time was First Aid, who was telling him that it would be impossible to find a cure and that there was nothing that could be done. He'd told Sideswipe that all the autobots would die because of him.

The worst one was his brothers. He' heard them when he was cleaning the mess he'd made of his hab. He'd heard a knocking and said some acknowledgment, hoping the one outside would say what they wanted. What he didn't expect was Sunstreaker's voice to come through and ask him to open the door. Sideswipe didn't listen because he didn't want to infect his brother and he told him as much. That just made someone on the other side angry because he'd heard a loud bang on his door, like someone hit it before hearing Red Alert's voice as well. "Dammit Sideswipe! we're all infected because of you! You caused this and now you can't even face us as we all die!"

Sideswipe didn't even try to argue because it was true. If they were both infected as well, it would have been his fault. He didn't think they were real. There was a chance they were but they both had the code to his hab and could have walked right in if they wanted to see him. Sideswipe didn't know if it was worse that they didn't want to see him at all.

After that, Sideswipe didn't trust any of the voices he'd heard. Mindwipe came by to complain about the quality of the energon he was given and Grimlock came by to forgive Sideswipe and tell him about being a dinosaur. Acidstorm also came by for some reason to tell Sideswipe how he's better because he won their last battle.

Sideswipe didn't listen to anything after his brothers. He didn't trust any of the voices either. They'd all been saying stuff and the only one that was telling the truth was Blades who brought him the trash cans for all his broken furniture.

Sideswipe laid on his berth and… laid there. He didn't have anything to do. He'd finished cleaning his hab and bots would talk to him but he stopped listening a long time ago. He couldn't move his arm and a good part of his leg.

So he just laid there, doing nothing. he'd gotten a warning on his HUD that his fuel levels were very low but he didn't have the energy to get up and grab on of the many cubes still in the corner by the door.

Sideswipe was always a social mech. Okay, he wasn't that social but he typically interacted with a fair amount of other bots in a day. Now, in quarantine, he couldn't interact with anyone without risking getting them infected like him. He was the one to start the rust infection and he didn't want it to spread to any more than it already had.

He'd already lost track of how long he'd been in his hab. He turned off his chronometer after constantly checking it on the first day. He knew he was impatient but seeing that only 5 cycles had passed instead of 20 was always disappointing.

On the first day, he found a couple pens that Sunstreaker had left in his hab and used those to draw a few crude drawings. It helped him a little bit to move his hands in a controlled way but that didn't last long. He soon got frustrated with the two colors he had.

Sometime during what Sideswipe thought was the next day, Blades stopped by and dropped off some sanitizers and stuff so he wouldn't contaminate anything. Sideswipe asked for some colors so he could at least add more variety to his drawings.

By that point, he wasn't feeling very creative though, he was feeling restless. He needed to move or something, anything. He needed to get out and do something but he couldn't because he was a giant, walking hazard at the moment. He wanted to fight something, then he'd get that energy out.

Sideswipe found a sword he'd put in the corner a while ago and started going through a few controlled motions to try to get rid of his restless energy.

It didn't work.

Sideswipe angrily threw the sword at the wall across the room from him. It stuck into the wall and that gave him an idea. He drew circles on the wall to be a target. He retrieved his sword and threw it across the room at the target again.

He didn't hit the center as many times as he'd like but that's what practice was for. He had nothing but time anyway.

Sideswipe put a new hole in his wall when Red Alert commed him. He was just checking on him and even offered to visit him but on opposite sides of the door. Sideswipe wanted nothing more than for that to happen but he didn't want to possibly infect his brother. He'd already started the infection so he'd just have to keep his brothers safe and hope they didn't come into contact with anyone else who was infected.

Sideswipe had no clue how many people were infected now but he'd heard that First Aid got infected by one of the ones he was treating. Aside from himself, he wasn't sure who was infected.

It was all is fault too. He'd been the one stupid enough to go in the water, not thinking about the consequences. He didn't mean to cause so many problems. Everyone just kept insisting there was something wrong with him and told him to jump in the water to feel better. He just wanted to prove them wrong, that nothing would change about him if he jumped in the water.

Sideswipe probably deserved to sit with nothing to do since he caused everything wrong right now. He wanted someone to talk to but who would want to talk to him? Anyone who was infected would probably be mad at him so that wasn't an option and he couldn't see anyone who was still healthy. He just continued throwing his sword at the wall to try to quiet his thoughts.

Once there was a good sized hole in the center of his wall target, he decided to stop throwing the sword. his aim was now pretty good and he didn't want to completely break through the wall.

He picked up his blaster and found his markers. He drew a bunch of random designs on his blaster. When that was covered, he moved onto his sword, then whatever else he could find. There were now random drawings all over his hab. His walls, his furniture, his recharge slab, everything. It wasn't nearly as good as Sunstreaker's art but he couldn't exactly ask his twin to come decorate his hab with him.

After he was satisfied with the way his hab now looked, he got bored again. He still didn't know how long he'd been isolated from everyone but clearly nobody missed him if nobody was trying to contact him. Not even a comm message checking in.

Sideswipe accidentally broke his marker when he thought of how nobody cared about how he was doing. Nobody checked in to see if he was even still online, even after all he'd done for them, they couldn't even send him a message saying 'hey, hope you're still online'. He got nothing. Maybe they'd forgotten about him.

The more Sideswipe thought, the more his anger grew at everyone else. He wanted to get mad at them and wanted to go confront them but he regretfully cared enough to not leave his hab. He may have been angry at them but he was suffering with his rust and he didn't want anyone else to go through what he was.

Breaking that marker was quite satisfying though. He looked at the rest of the markers and tried to think if it would be worth it to just destroy them all. The one seemed to get a bit of his restless energy out so surely breaking the rest would help too, right?

He started off slow, the colors he wasn't going to use and the colors he thought were ugly. He started breaking them one at a time but it wasn't enough after a few times so he started breaking more each time until he just threw the entire package on the ground and stomped on it.

Not all of them were splattered so he grabbed his sword from the wall and glared at the broken package of markers.

He wasn't going to dignify them with stomping them again and instead started hitting it with the blade of his sword. He knew it would damage and possibly break the blade but he could get a new one later.

He continued hitting the markers until they were nothing but a pile of broken plastic and dark brown ink. That still wasn't enough for him though. He actually felt worse now that he knew what he wanted.

Sideswipe knew he wanted to break things but he was in his hab. He really shouldn't break anything in there.

Frag it all to the pits.

He didn't care. Nobody cared for him so why should he care about anything.

Sideswipe hit… something. He wasn't quite sure what it was but he didn't care too much. Anything in his hab was free game to be destroyed. He'd just have to try to make sure to keep the energon cubes that Blades brought him a while ago.

He was apparently hitting the table beside his recharge slab. He also found out that his sword hadn't been sharpened in a while and that was probably why it was left in the corner. It broke. The blade snapped in half and the tip if it flew up and hit him in the helm.

That seemed to fuel his anger even more because he grabbed the broken piece that hit him and started stabbing his recharge slab and tearing into it. He didn't know that he'd cut himself from gripping the blade until he noticed the bright blue energon all over the slab and still dripping down the broken blade.

That made Sideswipe realize what he was doing. He dropped the blade and looked at his servo. It was a mess of energon. His energon. He'd have to stop the bleeding. Or he could let the energon dry up and fix itself.

He looked around his hab, at the damage he'd done to it. Nothing was left of his furniture. He'd broken his datapad, his only way to access any kind of entertainment.

Everything was destroyed. There was nothing but a mess all around him.

He would die in this mess.

His mess.

He would die in a mess of his destroyed things.

Things he'd destroyed with his own hands.

Because that's all he was good for.