Chapter Text
Optimus was left alone in the command center for three quiet astro-hours until Ratchet barged into the room without greeting. Three hours was how long it took for Ratchet to fight off the hold of every junior medic in the medbay, and Optimus had to admire their resolve for lasting so long.
Ratchet’s vents huffed and labored in irritation. If the door had hinges, he would have slammed it. He marched towards Optimus’s turned back like nothing—no junior doctor, no procedural medical checkup, no harrowing Decepticon run-in—could ever stop him.
Optimus turned deliberately away from the dull colors of the holo-screen. “I was worried about you, old friend. I’m glad you’re safe.”
“I was fine,” Ratchet said automatically, waving a hand like he could physically bat away the concerns. “I’ve been saying it, but no one seems to believe it.”
Optimus studied Ratchet intently for a second, trying to parse a lie. But if Ratchet shifted his pedes, if his vents puffed hard, it was only from his usual aches and his usual temper. When the old CMO raised a brow-plate in challenge, Optimus copied the motion and let some hint of curiosity seep into his own EM field. “It seems you had some protection.”
Ratchet sniffed and did not falter. “At the outpost? I was safer than you might have been.” When he pointed to the screen, it was at a slice of footage prominently featuring Starscream’s pretty faceplate splattered in blood-energon. “With the last mech that took a shot at the prime.”
“Lots of mechs do that.”
Ratchet paused the video with a jab that threatened to break the keyboard. The footage had been edited for additional brightness in post. There was Starscream on top of Vortex, frame pressing down, red optics blazing. In the darkness their blocky silhouettes were defined by the glossy shine of wax and machine fluids. Starscream, pulling wires back from Vortex’s neck. His sharp claws curling metal shavings off of Vortex’s frame. Snarling, head-butting, faces together, each of them tasting the other’s blood-energon. It was a murder intimate in its closeness and it was recorded for certain members of Autobot High Command to repeatedly peruse.
Ratchet leveled Optimus with a look so judgmental it could have stripped paint off of steel. Optimus let a slow vent brace himself. “Alright,” he said.
“Alright, what?” Ratchet challenged.
“You have to see it’s a little funny. Each of us with our extremely unwise attachments.” Optimus drummed his servos on the table.
“I’m not the repeat offender.”
“Ha!” The laugh escaped Optimus like it was punched out of him, like it hurt.
Ratchet squinted at him. Some of the righteous fire simmered down. “Just—Starscream? Really? Who is this mech?”
"Someone Orion knew.”
“You are Orion.”
“Who’s Deadlock?”
Ratchet tensed and Optimus thought that would be the end of it—Ratchet would turn on his heel and storm out the way he came. Instead, Ratchet grabbed a chair from the nearby conference table and dragged it over to Optimus’s monitor seat with more force than strictly necessary. Optimus waited as the CMO sat gingerly to spare his joints and then kicked back with his arms folded.
“There’s no way you need me to tell you about the kid,” Ratchet grunted. “Jazz would’ve done a profile on him centuries ago and told you.”
Optimus nodded. “Your loyalties aren’t in question. As a leader, I know all I need to. As your friend, I must admit that I am a little worried. And extremely curious.”
Ratchet scratched at his chin guard, scowling. “He wasn’t Deadlock when I knew him. He was a burnout I met in the Dead End, at my old clinic. I wish things had been better for him. That’s all.” He narrowed his gaze at Optimus, never one to let things lie. “Now, about Starscream. Why didn’t you ever introduce us?” The question was only half-sarcasm. There had been a point in time when Orion had counted both Starscream and Ratchet as true friends, but he had hidden that part of his life from Ratchet until the very end, when Ratchet was the only mech he could fall back on as Optimus.
“I didn’t want to involve you in my illegal pastimes,” said Optimus. “My book club.”
“And?”
“Ratchet, if I asked him, I’m almost certain Starscream would have refused to meet anyone I knew. He missed his wealth, missed Vos, and looked down on Iacon as a lesser version of it. Anything it touched wasn’t worth his time. It was a point of contention in my early acquaintanceship with him. . .”
“Hell, I hated Iacon, too. The way things were ran.” Ratchet rolled his neck and conceded with some dark humor, “But I wasn’t going to join the Decepticons over it.”
Optimus smiled grimly behind his mask. “Personality-wise, you probably would have hated each other regardless. Starscream makes being difficult a point of pride.”
“And you liked him, why?”
“He was very funny.”
Ratchet threw his arms up. “Funny! Oh, he was funny. Next time I see Starscream, I’ll jump in front of him and let him put me out of my misery. I bet you’d be jealous.”
The worst two astro-weeks of ex-commander Boltcase’s functioning closed out with a long fall and a splash. In alt mode, she fell from the sky and tumbled end-over-end into a huge, bank-less pool lined with bricks and lit up at the bottom with the metal sheen of a galaxy’s worth of different currencies. It was the Unix Venis wishing well, where citizens and travelers alike tossed coins into the water for a passing prayer. Fortune ruled Unix Venis in both senses of the word: money and luck.
Sinking fast, Boltcase transformed in a panicked flurry of bubbles, her pedes kicking up coins and clouds of old silt as she hit the bottom. Her HUD blared with pressure warnings. She sunk her claws into the shitty welds holding the Decepticon emblem to her chassis, snapping it off and tossing it aside to let the sunken waters bury the dark, sharp shape of it at last. Swimming was out of the question and the mech had no thrusters to speak of, so she simply waded over to the wall of smooth bricks and kicked the toes of her pedes into the mortar between them. Like this, Boltcase scraped her trembling way to the top, holding on with the cracked tips of her servos and the last manic remnants of her willpower.
Boltcase broke the surface before a crowd gone still in the busy square. She hauled herself out of the well and collapsed with a mechanical wheeze, dirty water pouring out from between gaps and joints.
A small organic alien with a bundle of purple tentacles for a face observed her with miffed curiosity but no apparent fear. His eyeless attention seemed, for a moment, directed to the bare silver outline where the Decepticon emblem used to be.
“A runner?” said the alien. Boltcase’s universal translator worked with a slight delay, so she could hear the bubbling snaps of his sing-song language an astro-second before any meaning registered.
Boltcase’s scarred mesh lips parted around her dentae. A threat. “How about a traveler?”
Nonplussed, the alien pointed a curling tentacle eastward. “You’ll want to go that way, then. There’s a bar, or—I forget the word—refueling station ran by your kind.”
Boltcase considered erasing him where he stood, but what would be the point? She got onerously to her pedes and then trudged three blocks over to crash through the saloon doors of a Cybertronian-style oil-house. This entrance put a ruinous, screeching halt to the establishment’s air of convivial balance, but she sat down, put credits on the bar for a cube of whatever they had, and looked hunted enough that the other patrons slowly, carefully, relaxed. She was one of them. A refugee.
This whole ordeal—the crumbling of Boltcase’s old life, the explosion of space blown out for her new one—was graceless, sopping wet, and largely humiliating, but Slipstream somehow had it worse. Some time later, Slipstream fell from the sky like a loose mannequin and crashed through the roof of a single-room shack.
Police didn’t really exist on the gambling crime planet of Unix Venis. Two hours after the incident, Boltcase went off to investigate the crash-landing by herself. (Her friends at the oil-house had reported the news and then went totally silent after an unenthusiastic truck said, “Damn. I guess someone should check that out.”) Despite everything, she could still muster curiosity.
Unfortunately, she reached the crash site to find a conflicting party had already gotten there first. Boltcase stiffened as she rounded the corner and was met with the sight of Arcee’s pink backplates. The other femme was caught up in a bewildered argument with the owner of the affected establishment, a professional shoemaker judging by the picture on the toppled sign they stood next to. The shoemaker gestured with great emotion and a tripod of little fleshy limbs on which he wore red shoes: cloth coverings organics put on their pedes for protection and fashion. A shoemaker could be kept quite busy fitting the strange and various feet of a strange and various place like Unix Venis.
The shoemaker was a small green thing with a huge mouth and blue eyes dangling from two wobbly stalks. They didn’t even reach Arcee’s knee strut, but they seemed to be holding their own against the Autobot.
“Get out of here!” they were saying. They gestured wildly with trembling eye-stalks. “I see you, marked with red!”
Arcee’s delicate hand went instinctively to the frowning Autobot badge above her spark. She said, “Whoa, you’re not in trouble! I only have questions. It seems like one of my people has. . . passed through here.” She gestured to the low roof, which was missing a chunk of rafter in a damningly near-perfect cutout of a Cybertronian frame. With wings.
The alien cried, “I’m not going to be a part of any feud! More of you will come soon, shooting everywhere and trying to kill each other! No! Go away!”
For Boltcase, any chance of a subtle escape was neatly eliminated. The alleyway was small and she cast a long shadow.
The shoemaker spotted Boltcase first. They crowed, “Look!”
Arcee broke off her exasperated questioning and turned around.
Boltcase could ignore her. Boltcase could reach for her weapon. I could say hi, she thought blankly. . . or there was still time to dismiss the whole ordeal as a lost cause and walk right back out of that alley. Torn between options, she did nothing.
The ex-Decepticon had gone from a muddy, flaking blue to a incongruently delicate pastel yellow. Suddenly, the change didn’t seem anywhere near a disguise. There had been a phase a few centuries back where Boltcase had dallied in the experimental modding scene (ruled by Decepticon sensibilities) and as a result she knew she owned a distinctive sort of frame with a distinctive sort of ugly. The shape of her mouthpiece was lined with a parallel field of creases from where the faceplate could peel away in tiny triangular plates and unmask her dentae. It was the kind of faceplate people remembered. It was the kind of faceplate that followed people around in their nightmares.
Arcee’s optics were shielded with a light visor made of red glass, but her full attention lighted unmistakably upon the newcomer. There was a flicker of puzzled interest. “Hey? Who’re you?”
Armed thug. Concerned citizen. “Neutral Cybertronian representative for this city,” said Boltcase gruffly. “This. . . case. . . is under my jurisdiction. You can leave now.”
Arcee drew herself up—and ugh, Boltcase recognized this. This was the I’m-planting-my-pedes-and-not-running stance.
The shoemaker clicked his fat pink tongue. “You two aren’t going to start fighting, are you?”
Boltcase grunted, which was not a promise either way.
“No,” said Arcee sweetly, and then she not-so-subtly turned her back on the alien in favor of Boltcase. “Do we know each other?” She tilted her pink and white helm, elegant even in her scrutiny. Arcee was prone to strangely delicate movements like that, betraying a background somewhere in the middle to upper classes—but she was a warframe now, and Boltcase did not have to wonder how well the other mech had taken to the change. Arcee’s murder attempts were almost always successful, and though almost was the key word here, it was still never a pleasant experience for Boltcase. The only other comparable enemy was Slipstream.
“No,” said Boltcase firmly. She turned to the gangly shoemaker. “So, uhhhh. . . I live nearby. Word is that someone fell through your roof? Don’t care about details. I’ll take them off your hands. Quickly.”
“Right this way, right this way,” said the shoemaker, gesturing Boltcase towards a door she couldn’t squeeze through if she crawled through on her front.
“I’ll come, too,” Arcee announced.
“Get lost,” said Boltcase. She took a running leap and flung herself at the edge of the roof, digging her servos into tiny shingles and clumsily hauling herself into the only entrance suitable, makeshift though it was: the pre-made hole of the crash site. Crumbling bits of building rained down from her movements, worsening the damage more than she had intended and more than the shoemaker would have preferred. The little alien shrieked curses at her back, but Boltcase tipped forward.
A short fall and then she was inside. In flashes Boltcase saw little shoes displayed on dinky show columns, littering the store like stalagmites. Her entrance cut down seven columns, and, fumbling, she displaced three more by the time she was able to orient herself. She hit her helm on the ceiling twice before it occurred to her she might hunker down and stop moving. She rubbed her helm, cursing quietly, wondering at what the others had heard outside. The shop was dim, but a spotlight of sun poured in from above to make the shabby metal fixings wink and glint. They were the color of oxidized copper. Architecture in Unix Venis favored shades of purple and green and interior design was the same.
Arcee landed neatly beside Boltcase with the graceful ease of a cyber-cat. The Autobot didn’t even have to bend so uncomfortably to accommodate herself within the close quarters. Ignoring Boltcase’s glower, Arcee blew some dust off a pink pauldron and said, “What’s your designation?” like there was no break in the conversation at all.
“Not important. You don’t ask that around here.”
Arcee’s mouthpiece was red and glossy, painted with crisp edges. The neat shape of it twisted in amusement. “Then what do you call each other? ‘Hey, you?’”
Boltcase didn’t dignify that with a response. She saw the Cybertronian frame slumped over in the center of a small crater and groaned to recognize Slipstream. Slipstream, with her fine wings bent and her sharp talons lax, lay in the building’s foundation with broken floorboards all around her. Boltcase had unavoidably landed on top of her before scrambling away in stumbling blindness, so marring the seeker’s thigh were a few new dents matching the heel of a thick pede.
Arcee misinterpreted Boltcase’s distaste. “Decepticon! This one’s nasty, I, hear, but they all are. I’ll call this in, but in the meantime you and I will be fine together.”
“Do not call anything in. We don’t want Autobots mucking around. No one does.”
Arcee jabbed a long servo at Slipstream’s slack frame. “That’s one of Megatron’s seekers. If we let her loose, she’ll tear the city apart just on her own.”
“Let me worry about that,” said Boltcase, though she felt her faceplate twist into a grimace as she said the words.
Arcee shuttered her optics in a squint. “You laying low or something?”
“Everyone here lays low! The whole planet is built for laying low!”
With a nonchalance designed to grate, Arcee turned away from Boltcase to look Slipstream up and down. “You could use my help hauling her out of here, at the very least.”
These were the most words Boltcase and Arcee had ever exchanged, but Boltcase had no appreciation for it. She almost missed the days they might have attacked each other on sight, because then Arcee wouldn’t bother subjecting her to the Autobots’ steamroller-chatter version of negotiation. Decepticons never argued when a matter could be settled with simple brutality. Talking had never come naturally to Boltcase. When Arcee crossed her optics and huffed to herself, Boltcase gave some thought to playing out the old routine.
They might have gone on like this until Boltcase drew her sword and Arcee recognized the shape of its twisted metal, but then Slipstream came online with a start and a rush of cooling fans.
A paint job could not fool Slipstream. Struggling through diagnostics, equilibrium destabilized, senses deadened from the waist down, the purple and teal seeker forced her torso upright like a hinge. There were four rapid blinks to glean her surroundings in snapshots: the green sky of an alien planet, the crumbling remnants of a roof cave-in, an Autobot, and then— Slipstream jabbed a claw at the largest member of their little gathering.
Here we go, thought Boltcase.
“You!” Slipstream shrieked.
Perhaps there might have been some signal, some code or wiggle of the browplates that might have convinced Slipstream without words to say nothing, but no. And Arcee had optics and audials, so she caught wind of a reunion immediately. It was not a happy one. The last time Boltcase had seen Slipstream, she had made several concentrated efforts to rip both of the seeker’s violet wings clean off. The last time Slipstream had seen Boltcase, she had hacked away at the Commander’s chassis with businesslike accuracy, hoping to secure a promotion in Boltcase’s absence. Boltcase won the fight.
Slipstream shouted, “Boltcase, I’m going to rip out your exhaust pipe and shove it so far down your intake you’ll be ex-venting smoke for the rest of your functioning! Where the hell are we? How are you here? I thought that tart Starscream killed you!”
Arcee drew her blaster before Boltcase even had the opportunity to make a disgruntled noise. Slipstream went to initiate a weapon transformation only to draw up short and slap her empty shoulders in alarm.
“What does Starscream have to do with this?” asked Arcee incredulously.
“Frag Starscream!” barked Slipstream. “Boltcase, did you do this to me? I bet you did! Where are my guns?”
“I,” said Boltcase, “don’t know what the hell is going on. I came over here to check out a crash site, but I wouldn’t have bothered if I knew exactly which stupid jet here forgot how to fly.”
With the addition of a third conscious participant and a loaded gun held actively within Arcee’s grasp, the argument could escalate to previously unseen heights. Unable to walk or open fire, Slipstream was determined to make up for any perceived weakness with verbal vitriol. Boltcase rather got the impression that Arcee was soaking up intel like a sponge—and Slipstream would not shut up! The seeker demanded, “How did you get here, Boltcase?”
“Secret mission,” said Boltcase without enthusiasm. A blunt lack of imagination did not lend itself well to lying.
Arcee shifted in disbelief, becoming more agitated by the second. “What kind of secret mission?” Though the barrel of her long blaster was held at an angle towards the ground, it was ready to raise up at any second.
Boltcase snapped, “Would you put that down?”
“To get friendly with two Decepticons? Forget it!”
“Well, I’m not a Decepticon.” There, it was out. “I said I was a neutral. And if I don’t come back from here, my new friends will have a problem.”
Slipstream made a scathing laugh from the back of her raspy voice box. “I never would’ve taken you for a turncoat, Commander.”
“Aren’t you one, too?” Boltcase waved a clawed hand at the seeker’s general disarray. “You’re either a turncoat or the Cons just dumped you here like junk because they didn’t want you anymore.”
Arcee pressed, “So what happened?”
“I said I don’t know!” Slipstream exploded. “It’s a conspiracy against me, obviously! I’ll disassemble whoever I need to when I get back. This is ridiculous. I minded my own business and stayed out of everyone’s way—“
“Except mine,” Boltcase said darkly.
“Shut it, deserter. There was practically a celebration when you went missing. Skywarp, Thundercracker, and Starscream had a party.”
“Ha! I’m sure they did.”
Arcee seemed to come to a decision. She shrugged with a nonchalance she didn’t actually feel judging by the tension stiffening her joints. With jerky movements, she sub-spaced the blaster. “Okay. Well. Despite everything that happened just now, it is my responsibility to offer asylum. To both of you. I can take you to—”
“—Come a little closer and I’ll take you back to the Well!” interrupted Slipstream.
“I’m sticking with this planet. Give it up, Arcee.” Boltcase nodded her yellow helm towards the mouth of the roof cave-in. “Get going.”
Arcee was not swayed. Of course she wasn’t. Her optics, faintly narrowed behind the visor, surveyed the other two femmes. “What can you tell me about Starscream?”
Slipstream turned to Boltcase. “Let’s just kill her.”
“Starscream’s an idiot and he’s crazy,” said Boltcase flatly. “His trine-mates, too.”
Arcee said, “What does that make us?”
“Frag this,” said Slipstream. She clawed at the wall next to her and began to raise herself up. “I’m going back. I’m going to find out whoever put me here and slit their lines. Try to stop me!”
As to who that was, Boltcase had her servo on a good guess. Slipstream’s method of touchdown on Unix Venis was just like her own. She paused, thinking while Slipstream struggled, and then ventured, “Are you sure you really stayed out of everyone’s way?”
Slipstream’s sharp attention honed in on Boltcase like a microscope. “Who?”
Boltcase fancied herself a changed mech. She could return some small molecule of good will if it was easy, and this redirection was easy. “You’re missing parts. If you’re chewed up anywhere, you got mixed up with Vortex. If not, I’d say Shockwave.”
The seeker bristled. “Those two— just to dump me here—!”
Whether Vortex or Shockwave were actually involved, Boltcase couldn’t say for certain. What she did know was that Slipstream’s strange appearance had the sloppy mark of the elite trine all over it. They could have deposited Slipstream on Unix Venis out of some misguided savior complex or simply to thin out competition for Air Commander, but that was none of Boltcase’s concern.
Absently, she wondered how those rust-bitten seekers were faring.
Megatron, heat simmering off of his frame and the long barrel of his energy cannon, stood on the edge of a crater with his vents on high blast. The planet was Earth, that blue and green marble Shockwave loved so much, and the battle was a lost cause.
“There you are!” snapped Starscream. Smoke and dust billowed out in thick clouds behind him, Autobots lurking in swarms around every corner. Starscream’s stride, purposeful and brisk, made straight for Megatron. “Soundwave commed, didn’t you hear? It’s time for us to leave. Call a retreat.”
Megatron did not answer, but he did not immediately insult Starscream, either. Starscream paused to cast an optic over his ragged, battle-worn leader and begrudgingly ducked underneath one of Megatron’s hanging arms, draping it around his turbines and over his shoulders.
When Megatron did not lean into his support, Starscream snapped, “Come on, brute, let me help you. Put that ego of yours aside for two—“
Megatron’s cannon transformed down and out of the way, and if the heat of the metal seared the delicate sensors underneath his gray plating, he gave no sign. Megatron grabbed a frowning Starscream by the pauldrons, maneuvered him chassis to chassis, and pulled him up for a kiss.
Starscream was caught with his lips parted in surprise. It was like kissing the side of a thruster after an eleven-hour flight. Facial burns. Smoke taste. Nose mashed uncomfortably against punched metal. It was entirely unpleasant, but so unexpected that Starscream simply hung there, slack, in Megatron’s grip for a few humiliating seconds until his stalled processor kicked back into gear and informed him that he was publicly being kissed by Megatron.
Starscream shoved back against Megatron’s chassis and broke away with his wings flapping in agitation. He darted to the side lest he be grabbed again, stumbling backwards to face Megatron with his dentae bared.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“What’s the point of you if not for performance?” Megatron was starting to smile, his optics scanning the smoke. Probably for hoping for a voyeur in the form of his accursed ex-lover.
Starscream shoved him. “Next time,” he hissed, “I bite off your glossae!”
“I wouldn’t have pegged you of all mechs as shy.” But Megatron stopped being amused the instant Starscream’s next shot nailed him in the silver faceplate. Knockout had put in new null rays.
Megatron seized Starscream by the wings and hurled him bodily into the crater. The seeker hit the dirt hard, but the new distance between them was almost worth the indignity. He rolled to his pedes with his dentae bared and his frame powdered in dust. Smoke billowed in, sweeping Megatron out of view. Starscream blindly marched towards the opposite side of the crate, not-quite running.
Optimus lurked somewhere nearby, he knew, but the thought of even seeing his shape in the smoke was so grossly appalling he couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t stand it. It was like the pinup posters again, though only Thundercracker at the time could see them for what they were. Starscream was so angry, his thoughts were skipping, processor running on ahead of him. Where was Optimus? He had such a way of turning up when Starscream was alone, like he had a compass point set only for Starscream. The seeker half-reached for him with claws to grab, not knowing if he would push or hold.
He met nothing. Starscream turned harshly left and right, his vision swimming with ashy gray. Optimus was with his Autobots, somewhere out there in a different part of the battle.
Why am I still on the ground? Starscream thought. He spat, transformed, and was gone.
Starscream only saw Optimus once, from the sky above: the side of his face as he gestured, a shoulder and a smokestack visible between plumes of smoke. The Earth’s solitary sun could catch the bared parts of his metal and make them glow.
Good job, my lord, Starscream thought bitterly. He’s still standing. He’s even looking a bit well.
After that pointless interlude, Megatron and Starscream remained separated in the short chaos of the remaining battle. In the ensuing retreat, they made it back to Home Base on separate deployment ships. Thundercracker kept pinging Starscream about some new nonsense of Skywarp’s, but he wasn’t in the mood to respond.
[Skywarp’s acting weird,] said his brother. [Or not weird enough—he’s not acting like himself, I mean. We got cornered in a tough spot back there and at first he seemed worried, but then he went totally blank. It’s like talking to a drone now.]
. . .
[Star?]
. . .
[Starscream, I swear on my every inch of metal you better be DEAD. I have my servos full. Ping me back or I’m calling Deadlock to go find you, kill you, and then take your place.]
[I’m busy, too!] commed Starscream at last. [If Skywarp’s not throwing a tantrum, keep watching him. I shot Megatron in the face and so now I am going to make myself scarce.]
TC commed, [WHAT,] and then sent a massive wall of text that Starscream did not read. He muted the trine comm lines, but not before sending a curt message to Skywarp: [Stop whatever it is you’re doing. You’re worrying TC.]
There was no running from Megatron, not really. And whatever happens, Starscream told himself, I will get up afterwards. He just wanted this overhanging dread, this weakness, to be over and done with, but he could not bring himself to seek punishment out directly. He drifted towards the medbay with the unshakable restlessness of all mechs with limited time.
“Okay,” Knockout said. “So Megatron is definitely going to kill you now. If it’s our last chance to crack open your processor, are you up for something risky and experimental? I recently was able to get my hands on a test subject.”
The grief had galvanized Knockout, made him unflinching. Starscream wanted some of that, hoped to absorb it from proximity.
“What the hell. Sure,” said Starscream.
“Skywarp!” hissed Thundercracker. “What’s wrong with you? Did they get you in the helm?”
“Nothing is wrong,” said Skywarp. He watched placidly as Thundercracker threw his hands up, paced in a tight circle, and then returned with an EM field rolling like acid clouds. Skywarp’s own EM field was entirely still, unfeeling, locked down so tightly it was as if it didn’t exist. He felt the world at a distance and made no attempt towards mimicking his normal speech patterns. Logically, Skywarp knew that this change in behavior was the ultimate cause of Thundercracker’s upset, but his trine-mate continued to ignore all of Skywarp’s matter-of-fact reassurances.
Thundercracker said, “Starscream’s in trouble. Again. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s something we can just leave him to because he’s got Megatron apocalyptic.”
“We should leave it alone. Getting involved will put us in unnecessary danger.”
Thundercracker stretched his servos out into claws, waving them over Skywarp’s faceplate like he might draw a reaction. “What is wrong with you? No danger is unnecessary to you!”
Skywarp knew he should say nothing of the blockers. Separated from his reckless, unthinking self, he could see the way forward and he could see how it was. “Listen. We know we aren’t going to fight Megatron.”
“I’m not looking forward to it, but it’s looking like we might have to.”
“If we did we’d have to kill him, and if he killed him than all his loyal followers will gun for us and Starscream will be the least of our worries. We could grab Starscream and run, but do you think he would go? He wouldn’t. The Decepticons are his best shot for a future and it’s our best shot, too.”
“I think he’ll go with us out of sheer embarrassment, to be honest. It’s different this time because, apparently, Megatron made a move on him during the battle and Star handled that exactly like he did any overcharged mech at the oil-house. We sort of know how Megatron gets with spurned romance, don’t we!”
“Megatron will harm Star.” Skywarp nodded. “Probably badly. But he won’t kill him. He’s had the chance to do so at least twice and he’s let Starscream survive every time. Running won’t serve us in the long term.”
Disgusted, Thundercracker stepped out of Skywarp’s space. “Fine, then. I’ll go. You stay. We’ll take you to Knockout’s later and root out just what happened to your—your processor, your personality matrix, whatever is wrong with you. I have to find Star.”
Thundercracker turned, but Skywarp grabbed one of his wings to halt him. He waited for Thundercracker’s backward glance and then said, “I commed Soundwave.”
“For what?”
“To stop you. You’re more likely to listen to him. He cares about your well-being and he’s free to intervene if it’s to stop you from interfering with his Lord’s desires.”
“Did you get hacked?”
“We have to stay out to this. Soundwave is arriving soon. If you want to run, remember that I can warp.”
“You will hate yourself for this later, you fragging idiot.”
“He can take you to see the cassettes. You like them. It’ll be okay, Thundercracker.”
“Let Soundwave come. Maybe he can help me diagnose you.” Thundercracker swung an arm around Skywarp’s shoulders, pulling him close in a hold that was not intimate because it was caging. Their wings clanged and jostled together. “And then we will all go find Starscream and Megaton together.”
Skywarp looked placidly at his brother’s mask-like face. Thundercracker thought Soundwave might check Megatron, that a loyalty to decency or efficiency might override a loyalty to Megatron himself, but TC didn’t know what Skywarp knew.
The seekers waited together as Soundwave emerged from the end of the dark hall. Skywarp watched, feeling nothing, as Soundwave nodded in greeting and then promptly pulled a stunner on Thundercracker, jabbing the blue seeker once into in a merciful stasis. Thundercracker went limp but didn’t fall, held securely by Skywarp with his arm still wedged around the other’s pauldrons.
“Skywarp: incorrect,” said Soundwave.
“About what?”
“First: Emotion-blocking modifications do not result in higher cognitive processing. Only appear to. Second: Under present circumstances, Lord Megatron will terminate Starscream.”
Skywarp felt a lurch from the front of his processor and the bottom corner of his spark casing. The blockers, failing again under a lurch of high emotion trying to break free as they were prone to. Soundwave hit him with the stunner before Skywarp could find out if they would break or hold.
Flashes of disembodied sensations stuttered behind Starscream’s blind optics, images splintering into fireworks of color he could not make sense of. It was like trying to spy the individual treads on a wheel racing across a highway: a vague shape, a blur, and then it was gone. Starscream hit the brakes, forced his reaching processor to slow with great effort, and settled into a specific moment like the stillness at the end of a crash landing.
A complex scene was broken down to nothing but sense memory and feeling: a scratched cd skipping over a monologue, breaking it down to base urges and one-word shouts. Starscream remembered an imperious anger and the force of his own blazing will. He remembered cold. He remembered snarling with teeth.
—They want it—they can’t have it—I won’t tell them—they’ll never know!—
The phantom memory of reaching inside the shell of one’s own helm, grabbing hold of something precious and then destroying it at the root.
Error warnings—grief, victory—It’s done!—and then an enveloping, inevitable pain. Then nothing.
Starscream’s vision swam, blurry and discolored like his optic lenses were looking up through a bucket of oil.
“You’re alive!” came Knockout’s voice, but Starscream was a few seconds late in registering the meaning. “It’s a miracle!”
That’s an. . . indictment against you, you. . . phony. The natural response loaded in at a slow crawl, weakened by buffer. Starscream had a thought towards speaking it out loud, but every movement, every action, came out sluggish. He rolled his helm against the medical berth like a mech bogged down with viruses. Was he? Just his luck.
Soundwave said something, but the flatness of his vocal modulator made Starscream’s audial receptors twinge so unpleasantly the seeker flinched. Knockout said his designation again.
Starscream grimaced, trying to understand. They wanted a response. “Slag,” he managed at last.
Knockout went back to being pleased. “A bit of buffer, but that’s pretty good, all things considered. It’ll go away. Probably.”
“Pits. . . did you give me bugs?”
“No, that’s kickback from the procedure. Unpleasant? It looks like it.”
Slag. From his newest and muddiest regained memory, Starscream was certain that the file corruption was something he had done intentionally to himself. For what? His processor wanted to race, but the buffer smothered his complex thoughts like a blanket.
He went to Iacon to avenge Shockwave. He must have gotten caught. He must have wiped his memories to protect something, encouraged his trine to do the same.
Megatron, Starscream realized. It must have been to protect you. You rock in my plating.
Knockout prodded, “Share any revelations?”
“No.”
Knockout rolled his optics, but he left it alone. “I should’ve known better than to expect anything worthwhile from you. I’m still a thrice-proven genius.”
The pain made Starscream petulant. “. . . Why’s Soundwave still here?”
“Well, he’s the SIC. I can’t exactly to tell him what to do.”
“I can. Scram, Soundwave.”
One thing about Soundwave was that he would never engage. He cut straight to business. “Effective immediately: re-assignment to guerrilla forces on planet Earth.”
“Earth!” The Autobots had claimed it as their main base of operations, transforming to hide in plain sight among the primitive vehicular technology there. Starscream’s bark hurt his own audial receptors. “A rust on Earth. . . and. . . all its useless little organics! Go back? There’s nothing there that could possibly be worth pursuing!”
“Energy,” offered Soundwave. “Autobot destruction.”
“Your safety!” Knockout said plainly. “In case Lord Megatron wants to. . .” Everyone caught Knockout’s glance at Soundwave. “Try again. You can get on the deployment ship under your own two pedes or you can get on the deployment ship in cold stasis, but you will go regardless. There’s too much at stake for the rest of us here with you drawing so much ire from the Lord.”
Starscream shuttered his optics in a harsh blink, partly out of frustration and partly in an effort to get his thoughts aligned. “You are afraid.” For yourselves.
“No one wants attention like you get. It’s getting to the point that associating with you might be bad.”
Starscream shuttered his optics again, speaking in chopped sentences out of necessity. “This order. The assignment. It’s coming from Soundwave, then. Not Megatron. To move me away. Does he know? Won’t that displease him, if he does want revenge?”
Soundwave droned, “Unrelated.”
It would displease Lord Megatron greatly. Starscream would have never thought Soundwave might move against their leader in action, even for something as inconsequential to the Decepticon cause as Starscream’s well-being. “Why do this? I’m not keen on debts. Frankly, I’m at my wit’s end and I’ve nothing to spare.”
Soundwave said, “Debt: unecessary.”
“It’s not like any of this is your fault.”
Soundwave said nothing. Starscream’s optics were having trouble focusing, but the SIC’s faceplate wouldn’t have told him much, anyway.
Knockout added, “We’ll say, of course, that this was all your idea.”
It dawned on Starscream then, his arguments exhausted, that this relocation was really going to happen. He could hardly move—and either Knockout or Soundwave would have the steel to simply tip him into a shipping crate and screw it shut. “Pits— damn it!” he slurred. “Where’s. . . my trine?”
“Skywarp: to join sabotage attempts on planet Silvon. Thundercracker: to join energy harnessing efforts across various moons.”
Separated? Now? “They agreed to this?”
Soundwave’s visor flashed. “Affirmative.”
Knockout leaned over Starscream, frowning. “They can’t just come with you, or it won’t seem like a punishment! The way you have of getting out of this is to run away in shameful disgrace. Hope Megatron isn’t angry enough to risk further embarrassment by pulling you back and making mechs wonder what you did to make him so mad.”
When Megatron was angry, he could make any risk or special effort. So could Starscream.
Knockout glanced at the seeker’s expression and sighed through his vents. “Good luck, slagger. I know you won’t miss this place.”