What Goes Around, Chapter 5: Persistence of Vision
Title: What Goes Around
Status: IN PROGRESS
Rating: T/PG-13, with a couple of chapters of R.
Warnings: Crack. AU. Genderbending...sort of. Non-canon-ness. Total mucking around with Cybertronian history, culture, biology, social structure, and...yeah, just about everything, really. Reading the notes and the prologue is highly encouraged. If you can swallow the stuff that's in there, you'll probably be all right with this story. If not...Well, then you need read no farther than that.
Main Characters: Swoop, Starscream, Ratchet, Mirage, Wheeljack. With a touch of Prowl, Megatron, Optimus Prime, Soundwave, and Thundercracker.
Genre: Crack, but with a (hopefully) coherent plot!
Chapter Summary: Haunted Starscream is haunted.
I awoke, as was usual of late, fighting the urge to scream. It wasn't a scream of pain or of terror, however. Rather, it was the kind of scream that one generally let loose when one was teetering on the edge of a blinding, all-consuming overload.
I'd been dreaming of her. Again. They were heated, fevered dreams, achingly real. They left my body and mind feeling utterly deprived, gnawingly unsatisfied, systems running very hot…and there was nothing that I could do about it. I could only lay there, order the computer to lower the temperature dramatically in my quarters, and then wait, panting and shivering feverishly, hoping that it would all subside, as it seemed to do ever more slowly as time went on.
Either that, or I could find someone upon whom to release the tension to which I found myself awakening, whether they wanted me to or not. But I hadn't resorted to that.
Yet.
I sat up on my berth, knowing from experience that the rest of my recharge cycle would elude me, that there was no point in trying to settle down again. Blearily consulting my chronometer, I noted that it had been a mere forty-five minutes since I'd shut down. Sighing, weary in both mind and body, I drew my knees into my chest, folded my forearms on top of them, and then rested my forehead on top of my arms. I stayed in that position for more than a few minutes, working at calming myself. It was more difficult to do so than it had been the previous night.
It was getting worse. I was getting worse. Sounds and sensations from the dream lingered, even though I was fully awake. I could feel her against me, her teeth gnawing on me, her fingers digging into exquisitely sensitive spots that were tingling at me even now. I could hear her still, too, sighing and snarling and whispering wanton, passionate words directly, so it seemed, into my mind.
"Stop," I murmured quietly but desperately, shifting position slightly so that I could frantically massage circles on the sides of my head, as if I could somehow drill into it and physically remove whatever it was that was plaguing me. "Stop, stop, stop…" I repeated over and over again, mantra-like, for long minutes.
Slowly, much more slowly than I would have liked, my mind quieted, my body returning, for now, to its normal state. "Normal," of course, being a relative term. Really, normality had ceased to exist for me the moment that Ratchet had called us regarding Swoop, and I was beginning to believe that it would forever elude me now, as if I was existing now in some permanently altered state.
I had indulged in extensive research since returning from my encounter with Swoop. I hadn't had the time to do so beforehand, especially because after Ratchet's call I'd quickly lost touch with most of my sanity, drowned as it quickly became in the overwhelming instinctive desire for Swoop. The problem was that I wasn't entirely sure that my sanity had returned intact. Or at all. It should have, so my research told me. I now thoroughly understood even the most minute details of what was known of the nature and purpose of royal imprinting, and I knew that it should have lasted at most a day or two after I had fulfilled my obligation to Swoop. I should no longer be feeling a need to think of her, should no longer be reliving the things that we had done with and to each other, and I definitely shouldn't be feeling a subconscious desire for her that, now, was insidiously starting to bleed over into a conscious desire for her, all against my will.
It was unacceptable. I wanted it to stop. But since what I was experiencing was not normal - at least, nothing like it had ever been recorded, so far as my research went - I had no idea how to make it stop. Nor could I talk to anyone about it. Doing so would require revealing to them information that they couldn't know; I would be gravely endangering myself if I were to do that. So the only individuals that I could conceivably talk to about the situation were Megatron and Soundwave. Neither option appealed in the slightest. So, I was trapped.
A desperate and increasingly insane part of me felt a need to put in an illicit call to Ratchet, to somehow contrive to meet face-to-face with the Autobots' medic. I could actually talk to him about the situation, at least, whereas I couldn't talk to any Decepticon. And maybe Ratchet might have access to information and knowledge databases to which I wasn't privy or that I wasn't even aware existed. Yes, it was a very tempting notion to have a nice, long chat with that particular Autobot.
But I hadn't resorted to that.
Yet.
For the moment, all I could do was to attempt to distract myself. I'd tried many means of doing so, but the only thing that had worked so far had been to bait Megatron into an argument that had devolved into physical violence. I hadn't intended this as an attempt to distract myself. It was just that my "condition" had greatly shortened my fuse and significantly reduced the amount of patience I had for my "illustrious" leader. So it was through sheer serendipity that I'd learned that pain temporarily eclipsed and then completely silenced for a blessedly long time the thoughts, sensations, and visions that pounded more and more often through my mind, slowly eating away at what was left of my sanity. The pain and its resulting quiet had been a welcome relief…and it had given me an idea. Now, if I couldn't quiet myself any other way, I had an experiment all planned out. It was one that didn't involve Megatron but that would, hopefully, achieve an equally satisfying result. I had decided that a quiet mind, however briefly it remained quiet, was well worth whatever pain I had to inflict on myself.
Since I had managed to calm myself this time, I didn't have to resort to such lengths…yet. I was still keyed-up, though. I was exhausted, the result of almost two weeks without a proper recharge cycle, but a strange energy crackled through me anyway, leaving me feeling restless. So, as had become my habit, I hauled myself off of my berth and went for a walk.
It was the middle of the stretch of time that we'd arbitrarily deemed the night cycle, even though it was actually the middle of the afternoon, local time. Few Decepticons were about; those who were awake were either at their duty stations or likely up to clandestine nocturnal activities of various sorts that kept them from clogging the corridors. Still, I passed a few comrades here and there, many of them the same ones that I often passed now on these restless, dead-of-night peregrinations of mine. They no longer seemed surprised to see me prowling the corridors in a somewhat aimless manner in the middle of the "night." They dipped their heads in respectful acknowledgement at me, a gesture that I off-handedly acknowledged in return when it occurred to me that I should do so, and then they averted their gazes, going on about their business.
As usual, after about an hour of restless wandering, trying without much success to calm myself, I ended up on the bridge. Soundwave, the watch commander, seemed thoroughly unsurprised to see me when I planted myself next to his chair in front of the viewscreen; showing up for watch many hours too early had become a recurring trend for me. Soundwave merely turned and tilted his head to look up at me as I gazed dully at the viewscreen which, as usual, showed a benign view of the depths of the ocean outside, illuminated only by the light that Headquarters itself generated.
I wasn't seeing the image on the viewscreen, though. Other things were flashing through my mind, my walk obviously not having purged everything even temporarily from my processors. There were images of Swoop, of the expressions on her face when we had been together. There were echoes of the sounds she'd made. There were remembrances of the feel of her small, overheated body pinned beneath mine, and of her fingers scratching and scraping demandingly at me, and of the heights of ecstasy to which we'd driven each other.
I'd begun to suspect that Swoop was far more devious than I gave her credit for. She was a medic, after all, and perhaps she had done something to me while we'd been together, intimately connected, something that I hadn't noticed because I'd been too otherwise-occupied for my own good. Perhaps she had engineered whatever-it-was such that I'd slowly go insane, if exhaustion and energy deprivation didn't do me in first, thus effectively removing me from the ranks of the Decepticons. It would be an irony indeed if I'd refrained from killing her quickly and mercifully only to have her destroy me in this slow and torturous manner.
As it was, I couldn't rest for more than two hours at a stretch. I regarded my recharge berth with growing revulsion more than anything because the dreams were much more real and solid and deeply disturbing than the maddening phantom echoes of them that were now plaguing my waking hours. And more and more often the mere thought of taking in energon generally made me want to purge. I avoided it, ignoring now the advisories and warnings that were trickling ever more demandingly into my processors.
Already, I was becoming increasingly distracted and inattentive, no matter how hard I fought to hold myself together. It was a combination of the waking dreams and the exhaustion wrought by a lack of recharge and energon. It was, perhaps, a good thing that Megatron was currently between grand schemes; I had no desire to face down Autobots in my distracted condition. On the other hand, the fact that Megatron was mostly idle at the moment meant that he had liberty to notice that I wasn't quite right. He hadn't confronted me directly about it, yet, but I did notice the calculatingly speculative looks that he was leveling at me far more regularly than I liked. I knew that it was only a matter of time now before he'd be in my face.
"Conscience," Soundwave suddenly droned from out of nowhere, breaking me out of my thoughts. It was a welcome distraction, actually. Still, I had to be very careful around Soundwave. At the moment, my mind was relatively quiet, mostly under control. Should that change, I would need to remove myself from Soundwave's vicinity post-haste. There was no need to add more fuel to Megatron's fire, fuel that Soundwave would be only too happy to provide. Now, I regarded Soundwave curiously.
"What?" I asked of him.
"Your conscience troubles you," Soundwave answered evenly. His lack of vocal inflection made it difficult to tell whether he was asking a question or simply making an observation. I chose to interpret his words as the latter.
Soundwave was the only other Decepticon besides Megatron who knew about Swoop, having been on the bridge when Ratchet had called. Others had been there, too, but Megatron had calmly turned around and destroyed them all as soon as Ratchet's call had ended, so as to halt the possible spread of rumors. That left Soundwave and me. So I knew now that Soundwave was referring to Swoop and to what I was supposed to have done to her.
"I assure you that my conscience is quite clear, Soundwave," I answered tiredly but firmly. "I did my duty, and I did it gladly."
Which was true; it just wasn't the duty that Megatron had assigned to me. I had instead fulfilled a different one, perhaps a higher one, even though my motives were selfish. And, indeed, even though I was experiencing some fairly severe weirdness at the moment, I still knew that I'd made the right decision. I did not and would not regret the decision even if the consequences of it ultimately destroyed me.
Soundwave, meanwhile, made a small, noncommittal noise that I wasn't quite sure how to interpret. In fact, I wasn't sure why he was speaking to me at all about this subject. Was he sympathizing with me? Or merely digging for information, hoping to catch me off guard, hoping that I'd blab something personal or incriminating that he could then hand over to Megatron like a gift? If that was the case, he was out of luck. I didn't trust Soundwave half as far as a squishy could throw him. Even if I was half-insane at the moment, my guard would never be down around him.
"It is…surprising," Soundwave was uttering, meanwhile.
"Oh yes," I answered acidly. "It's an utter shock to the system when Starscream actually does what he's told, isn't it?" Even though I hadn't done what I was told. But Soundwave didn't need to know that.
Soundwave just looked at me levelly.
"Indeed," he intoned.
I snorted. "Damned if I do, damned if I don't," I said resignedly. It was the story of my life.
"Indeed," Soundwave repeated, and I could have sworn that there was a note of amusement in his otherwise fathomless voice.
"Shut up," I growled. And then I stomped off to one of the other stations on the bridge, all of which were unoccupied at this time of the night watch. My own watch didn't start for another three hours yet and, for lack of anything better to do, I decided to use those hours to dig further through ancient records and databases. Again. I knew that it was likely a fruitless endeavor, that there wasn't any information in them that I had not already read at least a hundred times. But I had hope that the activity would keep the hallucinations at bay.
For a little while, at least.